Issues with lighting builds and foliage

Kuckles22

Hello I am currently creating a level in UDK that has a majority of the level consisting of foliage. the problem I am running into is that the lighting builds are taking an excessively long time. I have narrowed it down to the foliage being the main problem.

Through my research to fix the problem it was mentioned that I could exclude the foliage from the lightmass build to help the issue, but unfortunately they never said how do do that. So if this is the solution an explanation would be nice.

to sum it up I need help optimizing Foliage for lighting builds.

Xendance

How long is long?

Kuckles22

In excess of 8 hours per build. I just really need some foliage optimization information.

sprunghunt

Lower the light map resolution of each plant mesh. Cuting the number of vertexes would probably help too.

Rurouni Strife

What is you lighting set up like? You could assign you foliage to a separate lighting channel and have it lit by say a dominant directional light w/ no shadows, or have it lit by that same light using real time shadows and cascading shadow maps in the light settings. It's all really about how your lights are set up and how the foliage needs to look. I did a personal project recently and I went 100% dynamic lights precisely for the reason you are describing. I think my results turned out great too.

So yea, if you can try to describe how your lights are set up in the engine and that will help narrow down a solution.