Lighting issues please help!

jordan.kocon

Hey all, so I am fairly new to udk and quiet a noob with it. Im wondering what im missing here... My lighting is looking terrible and I have no idea why. When I build lighting I'm losing all the details in my shadows, but all my meshes have an extremely high lightmass resolution (256 to be exact). In the scene I have 3 spot lights creating the glow from my fire, lantern and ambience glow. Then to light the whole scene I have a dominant directional light and a sky light. I'll post the concept I'm going off of and hopefully someone can help me with the lighting. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

Shogun3d

How did you create your lightmaps uv's? Generated or manually in 2nd channel?

jordan.kocon

Thanks for the reply kaburan. Lightmap uv's? I don't know what those are to be honest, as I said I am new to UDK So i'm guessing I haven't even created lightmap uv's yet.

haiddasalami

jordan.kocon wrote: »

Thanks for the reply kaburan. Lightmap uv's? I don't know what those are to be honest, as I said I am new to UDK So i'm guessing I haven't even created lightmap uv's yet.

you need to create a second channel and have all the uv's in unique uv space (ie no overlaps) If memory serves me correct, I saw you were using max.

http://www.3dmotive.com/product-udk-lightmaps

jordan.kocon

haiddasalami: Thanks for the reply! Firstly im using maya to model, and softimage to unwrap. Secondly I have not tried making unique uv's. In the object editor do you just go file unique uv's, or once you select unique uv's for the object are there more steps to 'apply' the uv's? I hope that makes sense, if not sorry I am a little out of it today.

haiddasalami

Darn dont know softimage. but in maya you can create a second uv set, do an automatic projection (usually this works out pretty well for me but for big pieces you might have to go in and unwrap with no overlapping uv's) and in UDK when you double click the static mesh change light map uv set to 1.

PS: Also UDK just recently got an auto unwrap which cant be accessed if you double click the static mesh and click generate unique uv's but the result is less than stellar.

jordan.kocon

I know there is a 'generate unique uv's' option in UDK, I dont have time right now to check and I'm not at home, but I'm wondering if this would equate to being the same as making a second set of uv's Maya. And so your saying the reason I'm losing so much of hard shadows and getting really blown out, soft shadows is most likely caused by one set of UV's? Also if this is fixed, should this scene be lit with a 3 point lighting setup (excluding the kiln and lamps) or what? I've never lit anything in a game engine before.

haiddasalami

jordan.kocon wrote: »

I know there is a 'generate unique uv's' option in UDK, I dont have time right now to check and I'm not at home, but I'm wondering if this would equate to being the same as making a second set of uv's Maya. And so your saying the reason I'm losing so much of hard shadows and getting really blown out, soft shadows is most likely caused by one set of UV's? Also if this is fixed, should this scene be lit with a 3 point lighting setup (excluding the kiln and lamps) or what? I've never lit anything in a game engine before.

yup UDK generate unique uv's is like making a second set in maya. Never lit a night scene but maybe a dominant directional light on low brightness might give the moon lit feel. Lighting is a whole another beast

Harbinger

Your lighting looks that way because everything is being vertex lit once it's baked. Like previously mentioned, each mesh needs a second set of UV's for lightmap data. In Maya you can create a 2nd UV set in the UV Editor, and in Softimage you can add a new texture projection through the Property menu. The generate unique UV's tool in UDK will work but it doesn't really give you the best results. You should unwrap by hand, using your diffuse UV's as a base to start.

Google "Lightmap UV's" and some tutorials should pop up. This one looks pretty good:
http://stephenjameson.com/tutorials/lightmap-uvs-tutorial/