Lighting/Normal/Building issue - Drowned normals?

chrisradsby

Hey fellow Polycounters, I've been having an issue in UDK.

I'm working on a scene that has sexy normal maps but and it looks great in the previewer til I actually build the lighting then most of my normal detail just disappears. I'm trying to figure out why. I've tried a lot of things already.

My scene has a
+Dominant Direction Light
+Ambient Light (For more control over the scene)
+Two point lights to check out the normal maps.

I have tried
- Multiplying Normal Map
- Changing the number of bounces
- Changing Environment Intensity
- Changing the Diffuse Boost
- Changing Values on Indirect Normal Influence Boost
- I've tried importing other objects into the scene, regular UDK ones, the same problem.
- All kinds of smaller settings that I can't really remember, it's just a haze of changing small values here and there and rebuilding to see the effects.

and lastly here is a lighting detail shot before and after right from the editor. Any help is appriciated, sucks that I'm stuck.

Stromberg90

Tried changing the lightmap size on the models, cause before you bake the lighting the lights are dynamic i think.
I dont know if increasing the lightmap size will fix it completly but atleast some i think.

Scene looks nice

Gilgamesh

Increase the normal map influence in world properties?

Oniram

the ambient light MAY have something to do with that.

chrisradsby

Gilgamesh wrote: »

Increase the normal map influence in world properties?

Yep, I've tried doing that. It's at 0.8 right now.

Oniram wrote: »

the ambient light MAY have something to do with that.

I have tried deleting the ambient light, it's the same result without it, I've tried deleting all lights except the point lights and it's still the same result. :poly127:

Xendance

How big is the radius of the light? The realtime light acts as an infinitely small light source, while the baked ones use an actual sphere that emits light, so to speak.
The default value for point lights is 32 if I recall correctly.

The setting can be found in the light's properties, under Light/Lightmass/Lightmass Settings. There is an option called "Light Source Radius". Make that smaller.

Though that works for the point lights, no idea about the directional light. You could just increase the depth of the normal maps by multiplying them in the material editor with 2, 2, 0.5.

chrisradsby

Xendance wrote: »

How big is the radius of the light? The realtime light acts as an infinitely small light source, while the baked ones use an actual sphere that emits light, so to speak.
The default value for point lights is 32 if I recall correctly.

The setting can be found in the light's properties, under Light/Lightmass/Lightmass Settings. There is an option called "Light Source Radius". Make that smaller.

Though that works for the point lights, no idea about the directional light. You could just increase the depth of the normal maps by multiplying them in the material editor with 2, 2, 0.5.

I've tried that without any luck, even multiplying the normal maps in the shader using a 3 constant vector/Normal map + multiplier.

Xendance

How big are the lightmaps for the meshes? Could be that they're too low resolution to capture all that high-detail light and normal information.

Ben Apuna

My first answer was going to be:

Try bumping up the Indirect Normal Influence Boost in the Lightmass section of the World Properties, the default is 0.3 try going higher.

but since you already tried that...

I seem to remember someone else having a similar issue and the cause was that the normal maps weren't imported and compressed (unpacked?) properly.

They need to be set to TC_NormalMap compression upon import IIRC.

Another problem could be the version of UDK you are using. There was a change in the August 2010 UDK Beta that was supposed to make normal maps show up better in indirect lighting.

Before Update:


After Update:


If it's not that, maybe this page can help.

http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Lightmass_Tutorial.html

chrisradsby

Ben Apuna wrote: »

My first answer was going to be:

Try bumping up the Indirect Normal Influence Boost in the Lightmass section of the World Properties, the default is 0.3 try going higher.

but since you already tried that...

I seem to remember someone else having a similar issue and the cause was that the normal maps weren't imported and compressed (unpacked?) properly.

They need to be set to TC_NormalMap compression upon import IIRC.

Another problem could be the version of UDK you are using. There was a change in the August 2010 UDK Beta that was supposed to make normal maps show up better in indirect lighting.

Before Update:
x

After Update:
x

If it's not that, maybe this page can help.

http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Lightmass_Tutorial.html

Thanks, yeah I know I put the compression to TC_NormalMap when I imported it. I've also tried bringing the scene into another UDK-version with no luck. It might be the point lights killing the normal map detail. Kinda sad since I think all that detail look awesome. I'll see if I can figure it out. Thanks!

Harbinger

There's nothing wrong with your scene, the behavior you're seeing is completely expected and normal, no pun intended

What you're seeing is simply the difference between the high quality real-time lights that Unreal uses for preview and the resulting bake, which is optimized to be efficient at run-time.

Stromberg90

^^
Along the lines of what i said.

Elliot Lucak

Apologies for resurrecting such an old thread, but in case anybody else comes across this thread wondering why their specular highlights are dead and normal detail is muted, it may simply be a matter of going into the material properties under Misc and unchecking "Use lightmap specular", and then converting lights to movable or toggleable (I use toggleable since I only want dynamic specular but still use baked lighting).

There may be other issues that could be affecting normals\specular, but I found not having a dynamic specular highlight absolutely ruined my textures. (It wouldn't be so bad if the quality of the lightmap specular was simply low, but the lightmap specular is actually completely incorrect 100% of the time.)