UDK BSP Shadow Issues

snow

hi goobs,

tsk, tsk.... UDK April/May is giving me the same BSP shadow artifacts. Static meshes light normally, but bsp lightmaps turn out blobby/random, and also as seen in the image below, artifacts occur where there are edge loops in the BSP.

increasing the lightmap resolution creates even WORSE shadows, huge black artifacts randomly.

anyone know what could be causing this? I'm not really sure on troubleshooting, any help would be great.

thanks!

ParoXum

Those shadows are not great indeed, and the BSP technique should be kept for prototyping only IMO.

Maybe give a try at a terrain ground or full static meshed ground, since it seems flat, shouldnt be a problem.

Xendance

On BSP surfaces lower number in the ligthtmap resolution field means higher resolution. It means "number of unreal units per lightmap texel" or something like that.

snow

Ah thanks guys, it's basically a town i'm building, so ideally i'd like to avoid having a custom static mesh for every block as they're all different, but i guess i'll just use static meshes and terrain. disappointing though.

Andrew_Morris

Those type of artifacts are from your BSP lightmap res being too low and using a Dominant directional light (which burns lightmaps with a slightly different process than non-Dominant lights).

Like Xendance said the lightmap res you set on BSP is the reverse of what you think, setting it to higher numbers will decrease the quality. A setting of 8 should get you pretty good shadows, although you might want to pick and choose which surfaces you set to higher res.

snow

Okay thanks, I still don't understand why I get artifacts between edge loops on BSP's, for example at the base of the tree stump on the left image.

Andrew_Morris

I think that might be because of slightly different mapping on the different faces, select one face Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V on the other surfaces, that should copy the mapping, material, and lightmap res so they match up.

claydough

ParoXum wrote: »

Those shadows are not great indeed, and the BSP technique should be kept for prototyping only IMO.

Maybe give a try at a terrain ground or full static meshed ground, since it seems flat, shouldnt be a problem.

I thought only BSP or terrain could be ground floors in UDK? ( or at least that was the case back in the day )

Has this changed? A static Mesh ground is fine?