Spec/Lighting Problem in UDK

salacious_Crumb · Jul 2011

Got a problem lighting an asset in UDK. I've tried double checking everything I can think of.

Its the artifacts in the specular that I can't seem to get rid of. I've even tried blank normal maps (totally blue) and blank spec maps (total white), and its does'nt seem to be them. Under Texture properties, I've turned mipmapp gen settings to none.
Lightmaps-has its own unique lightmap with nothing overlapping and good spacing between shells. The staticmesh has its lightmap size set to 1024. Its using the right lightmap coord index (have missed that one before!).

So I think it must be the lighting.
The light is a DomDirectional, brightness of 1.0, Lightmass-med, etc

So any ideas whats going wrong?

salacious_Crumb · Jul 2011

oh and heres my spec and normal maps:

Ben Apuna · Jul 2011

Copy pasted from a couple of older threads so I don't know if this will work with newer versions of UDK as I haven't used UDK in a while.

Try changing the Indirect Normal Influence Boost from 0.3 to 0.

View -> World Properties -> Lightmass -> Lightmass Settings -> Indirect Normal Influence Boost

Then re-build the lighting. That might clear it up.

EDIT:

Just a comment on your 1024 lightmap... that's really large for a prop of this apparent size. It's probably fine for portfolio work but don't expect to be able to work like that in a production environment.

salacious_Crumb · Jul 2011

Cheers for the reply Ben, set it to zero, but that has'nt fixed it.
From what I can see my normal and spec maps don't have much noise in them. So I guess its something else.

Yeah, I was working with large size textures and lightmaps, I usually make textures double the size and then halve (or quarter-you know what I mean) when I've got things sorted out.
I just didnt want anyone thinking I had lightmaps set to 64...

Ben Apuna · Jul 2011

Hmm... it might just be the texture compression then.

Here's another thread that may have a solution for you.

Sandro · Jul 2011

Seems like texture compression to me. If you consider that you have diffuse, spec, normal AND lightmap compression working together those squares are not that bad

If you want to showcase your asset use realtime lights, modeling app viewport or something like marmoset toolbag.

You could also overlay subtle detail normalmap on top of existing one in material editor to break up shading at subpixel level.

Quack! · Jul 2011

Open up the normal map texture properties by double clicking on it in the content browser. Click 'defer compression'. Watch your viewport update and the compression go away. This is NOT permanent and will only be helpful when taking beauty shots, in game they will be compressed and look like you have it up above. Love DXT.

Quack! · Jul 2011

I just wanted to update you on this. I have been using "Deferred Compression" to get a better look at our models and ended up reading about all the compression modes on UDN. It seems epic suggests using Normal Map Uncompressed texture setting and halving the resolution of the texture.

I tried this on a small pistol first person weapon and it worked great. There will be many items you can get away with using DXT1 compreesion for, otherwise you can use TCNormalMapUncompressed.
UDN Quote -
"Because the memory usage is 4x that of DTX1, reducing the X and Y resolutions by half (ie 1 mip level) will make the memory usage identical. We believe that half-resolution uncompressed normals look better than DXT1 compressed normals, so the texture editor automatically reduces the resolution when choosing TC_NormalmapUncompressed format. The texture's original resolution is restored when changing back to another format."

Link: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/NormalMapFormats.html#TC_NormalmapUncompressed / V8U8

Ace-Angel · Jul 2011

Interesting, thanks for the update.

Spec/Lighting Problem in UDK

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