Baking lights SUCKS!! Does your studio use dynamic environment lighting?!?
polycounter lvl 12
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Just a micro rant but I've been 'stuck' using Unreal tech for the last 4 years and am getting pretty damn sick and tired of baking lights. Even using Beast just sucks. Looks great - but takes an f'n long time. Seems like there is just so much overhead involved w/ static lighting - lightmaps, lightmap UV's, artifacts, baking time, managing layers for baking, iteration time, managing lightmap resolutions, etc etc etc. I get it - it's fast come runtime. I understand dynamic stuff gets expensive.
Does anyone use all dynamic lights at their studio? Tell me you've got the same damned problems and that the grass is always greener on the other side!!
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Just a micro rant but I've been 'stuck' using Unreal tech for the last 4 years and am getting pretty damn sick and tired of baking lights. Even using Beast just sucks. Looks great - but takes an f'n long time. Seems like there is just so much overhead involved w/ static lighting - lightmaps, lightmap UV's, artifacts, baking time, managing layers for baking, iteration time, managing lightmap resolutions, etc etc etc. I get it - it's fast come runtime. I understand dynamic stuff gets expensive.
Does anyone use all dynamic lights at their studio? Tell me you've got the same damned problems and that the grass is always greener on the other side!!
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Replies
The grass on the other side of the fence can be brown indeed.
RTLs have different problems. they can be even more complex these days just to get a similar look, and can take a couple of days to setup and balance, editors can be unreliable and engine changes can screw everything up, hope that makes you feel better
There's numerous options in that light light button's check box as well if you haven't messed with them much. The one that lights only changed geometry is rather useful for tweaks but it can sometimes reference that most everything is changed somehow and basically be a full relight.
I agree though... take some of your lighting downtime for porn or drawing shit.
We looked at the Geomerics Enlighten stuff a year or so back. Stuff looked great. That's exactly the kind of real time feedback I would love.
The only person calling out my tech specs is Mitch, and I'm still baking lights.
It would be nice if the auto unwrap didnt' put shitty seems fuckign everywhere. i guess that's the way she goes.
fuckin' way she goes... n' goddamn erections..
[ame]
So it did an automatic unwrap but doesn't let you see or tweak it?
I've been hearing rumblings for months now that someone at EAC figured out a way to use devkits as distributed renderers for lightmap baking. Anyone care to.... shed some light on the subject?
We do. But having to bake lights for 1-200 minutes only to find pieces with errors can still drive a man mad.
Lightmappers have done automatic unwraps since the dawn of time. Some of them would also cut down the geometry into smaller chunks if they were too big to fit on a map properly.
Clearly, but I haven't seen an automatic unwrap yet that won't choke on certain geo and use space horribly badly, or throw seams in idiotic spaces. In these cases it's nice to be able to tweak the unwrap before the final bake (this is of course hopefully a last step, not something you want to be doing often during iteration).
It just feels strange to have control taken away from the artist. Is there a way to tell it to use your second uvset instead of generating its own?
Yea, as Don said, we have a about ~70 pc's on the job baking lightmaps. But sharing that farm w/ other level artists and programmers sucks. Even then, waiting 10-15 minutes for a bake is still horrible iteration time. Throw in the fact that the lighting preview in editor looks nothing like the final result and it really sucks!
@auto lightmap unwrappers - yes, there are some pretty good ones. UE3's built in one is pretty nice. Though as mentioned, there are quite a few edge cases where glass, bottoms of objects, etc don't need equal UV density. Lastly, evenw / the auto generate function, grabbing 20 packages and fixing meshes is a pain. And as for the golden seal of approval before use - production moves fast, things change, meshes get updated and inevitably 2nd uv sets get borked.
The benefits of lightmapping are inarguable, but it can be really frustrating how much it sucks the life out of a spec map to use it vs dynamic lighting. That and good real time shadows are one of the sexiest game art features on the planet.
Like others have said though, a combo force of dynamic + baked lighting seems to be the best solution so far.