UDK Lighting Glitch

Guy123

Hello everyone

I've been building an environment as part of a Final Major Project at university, and I'm running into an infuriating lighting-build glitch.

Please see the images below. The first image is with no lighting build, IMO it looks the nicest!.
The second image is what happens when I build the lighting on 'medium' quality.

The third image is a rundown for those without much time, to give a quick indication of the error.

It should be pretty easy to see. Basically the Road (cobblestone area) is a BSP, with four sides that makes a shallow bevelled shape. WHen I bake the lighting it... well its hard to explain! it just goes dark!

Any information or fix ideas would be greately apprechiated, I've been tearing my hair out about this for the past two days!

Thanks in advance.

Guy

passerby

what kinda lighting build are you using lightmass?

Guy123

yeah I'm using lightmass, I'll try not using it, though I was lead to believe lightmass forms the corner stone of the Unreal lighting pocedure

Thanks for the quick reply btw

Guy123

Ok, tried rendering with no lightmass. Got the following result. I'm aware that a couple of the static meshes still don't have lightmaps, so I'm not too worried about them, buit I'm still mega confused about the BSP road?:(

Guy123

I HAVE FOUND ZE PROBLEM!

I'm so happy, days of emotional turmoil and stress (this project is due in soon!) have come to an end thanks to a well informed classmate.

Ok, so for anyone else that encounters this problem. Basically, I had the 'light map resolution' in the BSP properties turned up to 1024.0 .
My logical brain though, this would be a nice large size texture map that should provide sufficient detail, and in the case of a Static mesh, I would be correct.

However, with BSP lightmaps, the LOWER the number, the higher the quality of the light map, with 1 being the highest quality.

I turned it to 1, et voila! it is shading perfectly with lightmass enabeled.

I hope anyone else having the same problems reads this post and feels the same relief as I have.

Good day to all!

keres

BSP brushes aren't recommended to use pretty much at all at this point. Lightmap resolution of 1 is a huge memory waste (from what I hear) and can dramatically lower performance. You also get at least three other faces you never see whenever you construct an additive brush.

passerby

keres wrote: »

BSP brushes aren't recommended to use pretty much at all at this point. Lightmap resolution of 1 is a huge memory waste (from what I hear) and can dramatically lower performance. You also get at least three other faces you never see whenever you construct an additive brush.

you could just put a blank material on the unneeded faces.

there is one called "removesurfacematerial" be equivalent to nodraw in the source engine.

a normal material is 50+ instructions or more the removesurfacematerial one is 5.

meshes are better but bsp isnt evil for simple things that aren't going to be reused whats the point of having to go into a modeler and make a mesh and UV it than import in when you can just make a brush.

though 1 is excessive something like 8 to 16 is a good light-map value for bsp.

Guy123

Aye, its only for the road, its basically a straight BSP, no point in static meshing that (though that would mean I could meshpaint it... hmmm... the possibilities...)

Thats one of the things I loved about the Hammer Editor, the easy availability of the no-draw texture, and every newbie tutorial I read stressed the importance of joining edges properly, and making sure all surfaces had no-draw etc.

I tried looking for a no-draw texture in unreal and couldn't find it, though that was a long time ago and I'm sure I was just being nooby!

As I said before, thanks for the replies guys! So glad I figured it lol.