UT3 vs UDK Lighting

[Cr4zy]

So because i get bored lots and have this UDK installed. I decided to compared the lighting engines. Obviously UDK and lightmass is much newer, and possibly better.

So i took a map of mine that would require next to no changes due to the majority being BSP and custom content, that map being DM-Z (http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/), which you can download from the glorious HOLP3 v2 (http://holp.beyondunreal.com/holp3.html) /shamelesspimping

So i have 5 shots from the original release and 5 shots from the version rebuilt in UDK, using all of 1 directional light and the mood cubes being emmisive casting light. The original had 468 lights.


UDK: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z1_new.jpg

UT3: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z1_old.jpg

-----------------

UDK: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z2_new.jpg

UT3: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z2_old.jpg

-----------------

UDK: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z3_new.jpg

UT3: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z3_old.jpg

-----------------

UDK: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z4_new.jpg

UT3: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z4_old.jpg

-----------------

UDK: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z5_new.jpg

UT3: http://cr4zyb4st4rd.youtea.de/Stuff/Z5_old.jpg

-----------------

You can all judge for yourselves ofcourse. I think there is some tweaking that could be done to get lightmass to offer some more contrast, there's things im liking from both of the engines and maybe ill figure a way of combining them both. :)

[Xendance]

You could try reducing the number raytrace bounces the lightmass calculates. I think I saw a setting for it in the world properties menu.

[Henrik]

Your original obviously has a lot more "mood" in the light, I like the shadowy ambience. I am sure that with tweaks to the lightmass lighting you can get equally appealing (probably far better) results, but right now tbh the lightmass doesn't look anywhere near as good to me. In the UT3 demo maps you can really see its potential though.

[Zomy]

I like more in UT3 :S.

[Cr4zy]

It's possibly easy to increase the contrast, im still learning it anyway. Obviously this is much more real although you lose a mood which is much easier to create when placing lights.

[MigPosada]

The (now old) UT3 maps were not designed for Lightmass, so they don't necessarily look better when switching to the new lighting system.

The old lighting system didn't have radiosity (light bounces) and lighting coming from emmissive surfaces, so level designers had to place manually a lot of auxiliar lights (hundreds of them) to simulate radiosity. If you switch one of the old maps to Lightmass, it's going to have a lot of extra lighting and kill all the ambience and shadowing.

With Lightmass light spreads in a more realistic way around the environment, so it needs less lights to make it all look nice and natural.

[SystemActive]

Good shot comparisons, having fun with the lighting improvements

[Brexer]

I know im barging in, but i have to ask, if you create a day/night cycle ingame, woudnt that be kind of bad with lightmaps / lightmass (or look stupid for that sake) ?

Just a thought i had..

[Keyframe]

I'm totally new to this - I don't know where to start even. Some kind of tutorial how to on start to finish for a simple mini game with menus would be a dream come true. however, to stay on the topic, I was wondering if it is possible to light/bake a level with 3rd party software, like Maya/MR for example and use that info in the game? I like to have total control over my lighting and, if needed, paint into the textures my own light info (I am fairly versed Maya user).

[Cr4zy]

The (now old) UT3 maps were not designed for Lightmass, so they don't necessarily look better when switching to the new lighting system.

The old lighting system didn't have radiosity (light bounces) and lighting coming from emmissive surfaces, so level designers had to place manually a lot of auxiliar lights (hundreds of them) to simulate radiosity. If you switch one of the old maps to Lightmass, it's going to have a lot of extra lighting and kill all the ambience and shadowing.

With Lightmass light spreads in a more realistic way around the environment, so it needs less lights to make it all look nice and natural.

The original one did have 468 lights a good proportion of that were bounce lights, those were removed and the UDK shots were done with just the directional and emmisive materials casting light, then lightmass calculated the bounces :)


Good shot comparisons, having fun with the lighting improvements

Thanks, still having fun myself :D


I know im barging in, but i have to ask, if you create a day/night cycle ingame, woudnt that be kind of bad with lightmaps / lightmass (or look stupid for that sake) ?

Just a thought i had..

You could create a day/night cycle however you would be relying on dynamic lights, that's then much more performance heavy. You can always use post-processing volumes mixed with matinee to emulate changes.


I'm totally new to this - I don't know where to start even. Some kind of tutorial how to on start to finish for a simple mini game with menus would be a dream come true. however, to stay on the topic, I was wondering if it is possible to light/bake a level with 3rd party software, like Maya/MR for example and use that info in the game? I like to have total control over my lighting and, if needed, paint into the textures my own light info (I am fairly versed Maya user).

I believe it is possible, however i haven't personally tried it. A map was released for UT3 with lightmaps baked in from an external program here (http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=680370)

[SneakySoft]

Looks nice :)

It doesn't really belong in this section: "Show off and discuss your completed mods"

[Cr4zy]

meeh it was a project of sorts.

[Repent_]

you could do a Wayyyy better job of the lighting in the UDK then you did ..

[Cr4zy]

I probably could. But that was my 1st attempt.

[Red Phoenix]

is this Lightmass a dynamic lighting solution ?

[Meathead]

Yea looking good man but yea lower the raytracing :D they should look abit darker very nice btw

[Stardog]

is this Lightmass a dynamic lighting solution ?
No, it's a global illumination solver. Static lightmaps with light bounces etc to simulate realistic lighting. Basically what HL1/2 etc had but seems to have much more properties to control and who knows how powerful it can be. Unreal was been stuck with basic direct lighting before this.

You can already do dynamic lighting/shadows.

[bastardbrain]

Hey Crazy
How do u import your ut3 files into UDK, mine crashed when i try

[Kantham]

I probably could. But that was my 1st attempt.

Learning, and specifically, mastering lightmass is probably going to take a while. From the way I understand the system, there's a lot to toy around with. You can dramatically reduce the light bouncing.

EDIT: Also, have you removed the skylights?

Here's a quick comparison I made for the bright themes.

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/7936/wolightmass.jpg http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/3281/withlightmass.jpg

[micahpharoh]

Hey Crazy
How do u import your ut3 files into UDK, mine crashed when i try

make sure it's the uncooked version

[Daniel Vogel]

Make sure to use dominant lights for best quality (resolution, dynamic object shadowing, specular, etc.).

[Cr4zy]

Since figured that out :D


Hey Crazy
How do u import your ut3 files into UDK, mine crashed when i try

Was custom stuff so i didnt have to import anything.


Learning, and specifically, mastering lightmass is probably going to take a while. From the way I understand the system, there's a lot to toy around with. You can dramatically reduce the light bouncing.

EDIT: Also, have you removed the skylights?


Yeah finding more and more things each time, and yes, no skylight.

[Kantham]

Somewhat really relevant to this topic.. Here's my quick attempt with VCTF-Sandstorm night. :B

http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showpost.php?p=2382785&postcount=130

http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/7721/lightmasssample01.jpg

In resumee, lightmass is the best thing that has ever happened to UE3. It really makes you fall in love with lighting (something I mostly always had problem with), no matter what kind of map you're working on. Hopefully not something extra large..

[ArcAne]

That looks amazing :O

[REDxFROG]

imo the UT3 shots look better by far. At the first look I thought the UDK were..on the second not.
There's a lot more contrast and shadows in them.
Trust me, you'd rather play in the shadowy map because it gives you a much better geometrical insight.

[Cr4zy]

snip

Big moon. Is big. Nice stuff though.

I loved lighting in UT3 Ed, and still do, think i spent enough time learning how to get it just right. UDK makes stuff look better if you're adding just one or two lights in and you're not having to focus on all the bounce lights, which takes out a lot of the work.

However, i bet i can do better in UDK then that, especially if i learn it.

[Kantham]

Actually, in most cases they are still adding lights manually (Non dominant pointlights). You have to control their light bouncing, I found out emisive lighting can be quite inaccurate in some cases. Hopefully I was doing it wrong. :)

I suppose you don't need Dominant pointlights. At least, not for most of the meshes they used in UT3. I'm still curious to know why exactly they choose Basic pointlights in VCTF-Necropolis. Still looks very good.

[Elude]

Here's some quick samples I made showing the difference between the new lighting and old.

UDK
http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/7602/lightmassambientocclusi.png

UT3
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/1474/normalut3.png

Lol I remember before when you had to place individual lights in and around the level to lighten it up, now theres absolutely no need! Unless you have a lamp somewhere I guess that you want to give off its own lighting.

[Crozz]

Lol I remember before when you had to place individual lights in and around the level to lighten it up, now theres absolutely no need! Unless you have a lamp somewhere I guess that you want to give off its own lighting.

You can use emissive materials for that :)

[Elude]

You can use emissive materials for that :)

But then you'd just get one solid color on a wall or object rather then a nice gradiant of darker to brighter areas.

I would think the rooms would just appear to be a giant blobbing color with no fine shadow details.

[ShawnWDP]

Emissive materials will cast shadows in the world, but they're soft area shadows. You can play with the Boost and Falloff settings under the Static Mesh's Lightmass settings to get more contrast, though there isn't really a way to produce a sharper shadow.

Here is a room lit with just an emissive texture:
http://i34.tinypic.com/2aac27k.jpg

Different colors:
http://i38.tinypic.com/535z5z.jpg

Both are lit with just emissive materials and lightmass. It produces a soft look that has a mood all of its own, but there is still enough definition that I think you could convincingly light an entire level with just emissive materials and/or a DominateDirectional. I'm impressed.

[Keyframe]

http://imgur.com/11DXS.png

ok just made a quick test with lightmass... any tips on how to control blotchiness and light creeps?
All of the walls have shading rate (lightmap resolution) of 1.0 down from 32 and I rendered it with Production quality

[Slainchild]

Maybe play with some of the settings in world properties. Although, your scene looks fine. If it was textured you wouldn't notice any of the blotchiness.

Setting the lightmaps to 1 is probably not the best idea though, 4 would look good enough.

Edit: Was messing with the translucent shadows stuff the other day:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v497/Slainchild/ab355d6d.jpg

[Keyframe]

I've set lightmap res to 4 now (1 was just to test the extreme). I'm ok with low resolution of lightmaps, it's only lightmap not diffuse resolution. However there ought to be a nice gradient falloff of the light info distribution, not splotches (kind of a problem with all renderers today - but I can control them in Maya for example).

Main problem is I have envisaged some level designs with pure lambertian quality to them, and this might be a huge problem for me - or maybe I'll prepare lightmaps in external renderer and have all of the level build out of static meshes.

There is also a problem with color banding with gradient transitions over the surface (not visible in the image that much) and is especially prominent with fog added. Since I'm fairly new to this, I'll have to lookup later if I can write my own post processing or fog shading code... just a tiny bit of monochromatic noise would break up banding without any problem. I also have to figure out why I don't have motion blur with game mode on and how to control motion blur quality/control once I get it to turn on.

edit: sorry for "engrish", I'll let my grammar errors stay. I have no idea what is wrong with me today :D

[Cr4zy]

snip

If those walls are BSP, setting the lightmap resolution via surface properties to 1 isn't low. It's high. BSP is back to front compared to meshes.

Oh Slain. You suck.

[JordanW]

http://imgur.com/11DXS.png

ok just made a quick test with lightmass... any tips on how to control blotchiness and light creeps?
All of the walls have shading rate (lightmap resolution) of 1.0 down from 32 and I rendered it with Production quality

Is the BSP constructed from planes? You may want to try building it from solid blocks. Giving the surfaces thickness might help the light creeps.

[daniwrig]

http://imgur.com/11DXS.png

ok just made a quick test with lightmass... any tips on how to control blotchiness and light creeps?
All of the walls have shading rate (lightmap resolution) of 1.0 down from 32 and I rendered it with Production quality

Also try lowering StaticLightingLevelScale in WorldInfo, setting it to a value of .25 will make the GI much smoother (although it will take much longer to build as well).

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Lightmass.html#World Settings

[Daniel Vogel]

The public link is

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Lightmass.html#World Settings

[Jamerio]

That test scene would look like a basic deathmatch level from 10+ years ago, so I think its a really flawed test scene to base your tests on.

Not being funny but if you're going to do benchmarking, you need to realise that you need to be good enough to push the engine and features you're testing otherwise it becomes a pointless test. And potentially mis-informing for those that do not know better.