Need Help with Lightmap Density

Jarod1872

I'm having some really annoying problems with UDK lightmaps, and since I'm somewhat of a UDK noob, I'll buy whoever can tell me the really obvious answer a cookie. Shadows are obviously really blobby and low res, even though I tried bumping the lightmap size on the bsp up as high as I can. Funny enough, if I put it lower, the shadows actually get higher res, although even at .1 they still look pretty horrible, they just take forever to bake even on this simple scene. I'm really hoping it's not my laptop, it's a few years old.

Snight

BSP measures lightmaps differently than static meshes. I believe it measures it in texels per area. Notice under the lighting options in the surface setting it states "Lightmap Texel Size". Not "Lightmap Texture Size". So the smaller you set the bsp lightmap texel size to the larger your lightmaps are going to be.

Jarod1872

Mine still says "Lightmap Resolution", unless I'm looking in the wrong place. In any case, bigger or smaller, I can't get crisp shadows. Past 0.1 it just zeros out, but still gives me the blobby shadows you're seeing. It does the same thing on static meshes as well, it seems, and just ignores my settings for lightmaps. I'm not sure if there's something overriding my resolutions or what.

Snight

I'm on a different build of Unreal here at work, regardless, the light map resolution you're changing is basing it off texels per area. I'm not sure what you're expecting...ith baked lighting your almost always going to see some pixelation, open up epic's levels or find any game that uses baked lighting. Also a lot of the "blobbyness" is hidden once you have textures on there.

If this is the only light in the scene, you could try using a dominant light. Here's some info on them: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DominantLights.html

Jarod1872

Thanks for the info man. Yeah, I've been trying it with a dominant light, but it's not looking much different. I know there's a way to get crisper shadows in a bake, at least a little crisper than I'm getting. On a static mesh, a 512 lightmap resolution looks just as sharp as a 2048, which doesn't seem right. I"m not sure if there's some setting I'm missing that is overriding the lightmap resolutions. I even tried changing the min/max LOD texture size in the config files, although it didn't change anything.

sinistergfx

It's an issue with your LightSourceRadius:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Lightmass.html#Area lights and shadows
(Notice how the shadows are sharper as they get closer to the bottom of the pillars, this is an area light/shadow effect)

Jarod1872

Sinister, I will buy you ten bags of cookies. That fixed it. You have no idea how many different things I was changing trying to figure this out. If you were a beautiful woman, I would propose marriage. I just might anyway.