Lightmass issues

Will Faucher

Hey, I was testing out a few props I'd made in UDK today, to see if everything was working properly. And I just came across quite a few problems. First of which is this:




Why does lightmass wash everything out? It totally destroys my normal maps, and adds some weird blue color to everything. Would the blue be related to the blue/purple tiles? And how would I go about making my normal maps come out stronger? Note: the backside of those arches is empty. There is no face covering it, since they will be against a wall so I wanted to save a few precious tri's.

Any help is appreciated!

Edit:I fixed the blue issue, it was related to the blue unreal tiles. Still trying to find out how to make my normal maps stand out more though, here is what it looks like with Xoliul's shader:


Edit 2: I just realized that I posed this in tech talk rather than the UDK section, real sorry, I was sure I had posted in the right place...

Ott

Can you post the normal map image? Normals tend to be assisted a bit by specular and color as well...to accentuate the high and low points. Default gray material in UDK is never going to look amazing.

Will Faucher

Sure thing. Here it is:

However, I noticed something else. I managed to increase the intensity of my normal map, however, here is what happens with lightmass. I just never noticed it before since the normal map was so weak: Notice that the right side is flipped, while the right side is correct. What is causing this? It looks fine in max and crazybump, and in the mesh editor.


And here is what it looks like in the mesh editor:

Eric Chadwick

I think UDK requires the mirror axis to be straight up and down only.

Also your light is pretty much dead on, which minimizes mirror artifacts. The Mesh Editor view look like it has artifacts too. What happens when you move the light so it's halfway between the front and the side?

Minos

By default, lightmass always flatten normal maps a bit. You can work around this by reducing the diffuse boost factor on lightmass settings. Default is 5.00 i think, I'm using something around 2.00 and my normal maps are more noticeable now.

It's just a matter of tweaking those values until you are satisfied with the results. It all comes down to how dirty and colorful your textures are and what you are trying to achieve visually imo. I noticed that higher diffuse boost values work better with dirty, colorful textures, while lower diffuse boost values work better for clean, shiny, interior surfaces.

There's also the indirect normal map influence factor, which makes your normal maps pop out a bit more inside areas being affect by indirect lighting only, but it tends to generate a lot of artifacts.

Hope that helps!