Shadow pools on terrain in UDK

bgoodsell

Hey guys, I'm working on a lighthouse scene and getting ready to show it off. However, i'm running into this technical issue with my grass and stone pathways on the terrain floor. I've attached a few screenshots of the problem i'm having. This has happened in both the May, June and July version of the UDK.




As you can notice, i'm getting these shadowing pools on the floor (circled in red). I've narrowed it down to my dominant directional light which is pointed straight down on my scene. Its contained within a lightmass importance volume and has cast shadows enabled (cast static shadows is enabled too). I'm at the point where all my preliminary guess of whats wrong haven't been the case (Enabling AO's, wrong light maps set for statics, ect), so I'm hoping someone else has had this problem and can point me in the right direction. Thanks guys.

McGreed

Hmm, I had those problems before, I think it was because of overlapping polygons, or unwelded vertexes, might want to check for them.
Btw, just to make sure, its not a baked AO map in your material you might have?

Zack Fowler

I imagine your cobblestones are casting shadows but the terrain lightmap is too low resolution to accurately shadow them. To get rid of the blobs you should either bump up your terrain lightmap res or set your cobblestones to not cast shadows. The latter would probably be best.

Visceral

Zack Fowler wrote: »

I imagine your cobblestones are casting shadows but the terrain lightmap is too low resolution to accurately shadow them. To get rid of the blobs you should either bump up your terrain lightmap res or set your cobblestones to not cast shadows. The latter would probably be best.

I second this, the Ambient occlusion will be enough to simulate the depth.

gannonroader

Looks like flipped normals or something. Maybe select the terrain and hit opimize in the geometry edit mode.

Snight

Terrain can be very sensitive with shadows from dominant directional lights. Turn on wireframe mode and make sure your verts smooth. If have any noise in your terrain, you can get some funky shadows.