Foliage Lighting

[strangelet]

THANKYOU for foliage after so long! tis great fun.



this is interesting. used some foliage painting to lay down these meshes. the meshes at the bottom are properly lit, the meshes at the top are not.

since theres no way to edit foliage after its placed, no idea what to do about this. i think ive seen a few others report this.

and while im moaning at the wonderful toys you give us for free, the LODding and culling of these painted batches seems to be somewhat mystical . sometimes its very aggressive, but after a bake on this map, i dont see any culling happening at all. it would be nice to be able to get at these settings and tweak em.

i found an InstancedFoliageActor but it has no properties. baw.

great job on the foliage tool. heres a brief wish/suggestion list

1: ability to save foliage *brushes* , ie the configurations of meshes.
2: some tickboxes for disabling painting on transparent mats, staticmeshes, bsp, etc
3: access to the properties of the mesh batches after painting (for teh mesh swap, fine tuning of lods, adding map-unique material variations)

[Havoc89]

From my experiances with foliage mode, the culling of foliage is some how related to the collision mesh so that might be something to look at. At no point does it seem to switch LODs of meshes, and as per lighting.

As it says on the udn page, the light maps are tiled together into one light map of 100 instances. Your tiled light map cannot be more then 4096x4096 in size therefore you need to adjust your mesh's light map resolution to accomdate a fully tiled light map that can fit 100 instances while staying within the maximum dimensions.

I assume that tiling of these tiled light maps happen in a square to maximise texture space. So with 100 tiled light maps mean 10x10 light maps must be packed into a 4096x4096 light map. Now one question that does pop in mind is, do each type of mesh recieve their own light maps, or are light maps shared amongst all foliage meshes. If a tiled light map only contains one type of mesh then you can do a simple calculation to figure out what is the best light map resolution for your mesh. Otherwise if its shared... well then you can try to be careful and hope that it works out :P

[insectum7]

i found an InstancedFoliageActor but it has no properties. baw.

Haha. I know, right?

I'm sort of in disbelief that I can paint trees at one scale, then paint them in another place at a different scale, and that information sticks. With the old system you updated the properties, and everything updated at once. Each draw of mesh was within the same range of scaling as defined in the properties.

I think the intended workflow has shifted quite a bit. It's kinda an awkward shift. I don't necessarily dislike it, but it doesn't seem fleshed out either.

[strangelet]

oh idunno, i think itl work out, just needs kinks ironed. unfortunately im finding more of them the more i play with it -

this for example - built lighting at preview quality, got this fab disco lit foliage.




however after some poking it turns out that this is the result of meshes being vertex lit so that option is out

[Caeru]

oh idunno, i think itl work out, just needs kinks ironed. unfortunately im finding more of them the more i play with it -

this for example - built lighting at preview quality, got this fab disco lit foliage.




however after some poking it turns out that this is the result of meshes being vertex lit so that option is out

Vertex colours seem to be broken at the moment in foliage. I assume that EPIC will fix it in a future release.

[TorQueMoD]

Hey guys!

So I'm also having lighting issues with my mesh... figured there's no point in starting a new thread about it so apologies to strangelet if I'm hijacking.



The picture says it all. Also wondering why you can't hand tweak the foliage placement afterwards?

[TorQueMoD]

I'm sorry, its 3:40am here and I must be tired. I forgot to add a second unwrap for the lighting so my lighting issue is fixed. Still would like to know if you can hand tweak foliage once its placed?
Also, my model has working collisions but the foliage does not. Any ideas what might be causing this?

Thanks!

[strangelet]

i dont think foliage supports collision you may be better off hand-placing things as large as trees. foliage is intended for smaller stuff.

the staticmesh placing tool is still pretty good for things with low density like trees. plus then you get LODS and all the benefeits of placed meshes.

of course it can be tricky not to paint the foliage ON the trees after theire placed. i hide em.

[TorQueMoD]

Oh interesting. I figured foliage was for placing trees as well, not just grass and bushes etc.
That kind of sucks cause its a really handy tool. Was also wondering why my LODs weren't being applied for the instanced trees. If it doesn't support collisions though, does that mean there's no way to get the objects to interact with the player... ie have the mesh deform or move (like grass bending) when you walk through it ?

Got a link to a tutorial on how to use the Static Mesh placing tool or where it is? Google didn't turn up much.

Thanks!