"De Zandberg" - UDK Scene

movento

Hello Polycounters,

it's been some time since i posted something here. After some character models i decided to try my first environment modeling. This scene represents an art workshop called "De Zandberg" (Sand Mountain literally) that's located in Harelbeke, Belgium. I go there twice a week to practice some drawing and painting. A while ago my teacher asked me to make a virtual presentation of the buildings. So i started learning UDK to visualize it.
Here's my progress so far.







Here are a couple of pictures of how it looks like in real life.
http://bramraes.ninjachronicles.com/3d/Zandberg%203D/Foto%27s/DSC_0302.JPG
http://bramraes.ninjachronicles.com/3d/Zandberg%203D/Foto%27s/DSC_0303.JPG
I'm having a problem with the building of the lighting however. I have 2 lights in the scene, A skylight and a DominantDirectional Light.
The problem is that when the lighting is baked,UDK only uses the skylight.If i rotate the skylight the Dominantdirectional light gets active,but i think those are dynamic shadows and it gives me the message "Lighting needs to be rebuilt" in red. I checked the settings of the directional light and its set to active.
Using a point light doesn't give me this problem.

C&C are welcome.

Xoliul

Hey man, this is funny, I work not far from harelbeke

It looks decent, though i think you have some smoothing group problems. A lot of stuff seems to have a single smoothing group, you can see it on the lockers for example, lighting is a bit wonky.

Also consider changing the skybox, the default ones really aren't that fitting for most lighting scenarios.

movento

Hey Xoliul, you teach DAE at Howest,right?
That's also funny,because i'm going to study there next year
Will definitly fix the smoothing groups, and the skybox is a temporary one.

duxun

what lighting set up do you have for this in unreal ... looks nice..

movento

duxun,here is a picture of my 2 light's properties.



Here's a small update, i changed the sky(still w.i.p. though), added smoothing groups to most meshes and i made some more objects.

duxun

thank you !! just got a few questions :

1. when placing the dominant directional light in the scene (outdoor enviro's) do you place the light any were in udk space or do you place it inside the light importance volume box.. also what direction do you rotate it because i cant seem to get my terrain and objects to cast shadows...

2. for the skylight do you place one to cast ambient light for the whole scene or as i was told in a tutorial to place 4 skylights in the cardinal positions (N,E,W,S) with a low brightness and light blue for color ?

i basically want to have a lighting set up to cast nice shadows to all my objects and terrain..

maybe i need to change the lightmap resolution on the objects and the udk terrain?

just noticed that in my dominant directional light properties theres no CascadedShadowMaps... what is that?

duxun

i seem to have made progress... thanks for the help...

Xendance

I wouldn't use skylight to give ambient light. It just adds a constant amount of colour to the scene, washing it out. Go to world properties -> lightmass and there set environment intensity to 1 and then set the colour to sky blueish.

At least in my experience it gives a lot more contrast between occluded and not occluded places.

movento

Update, i removed the skylight i also changed the DominantDirectionallight to a DDLMovable,and that seems to have solved my problem. What exactly is the difference between the two though?

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5EzFMHQMRI&feature=player_embedded[/ame]