Dominant directional light on moving platform issue

[degeneration]

I've been following the 3D Buzz videos and I'm trying to get my head around dominant direction lights. I've found they don't seem to like terrain and CSG, but I'm trying to get them to work on meshes properly.

I've used static meshes for the floor in a test and they work fine, but I've added a mesh as an InterpActor and animated it going backwards and forwards using Kismet and Matinee, but the shadows from a mesh above don't appear on the moving platform. I'm sure it must be something simple but I've spent ages messing around with settings for hit.



Shadows appear on the floor and on the gun, but not on the platform...

[frozenfire2]

is lightmass on? i think DDL needs lightmass.

[degeneration]

When you say "on", is it not on by default? Noobish question, but I've built the lighting and Lightmass runs, otherwise would I not get a "Lighting needs to be built" message?

[frozenfire2]

anyway a while ago, i encountered this issue of DDL treating different type of objects ( terrain, CSG, static mesh, skeletal mesh ) differently. btw you CAN build lighting without lightmass. you just have to un-check the lightmass. in that way, DDL will not work.

then i being to experiment and study more about how DDL works. anyway here's what I found out.

1) DDL do not work without lightmass
2) they use dynamic shadows on skeletal meshes. That's why shadows on your gun/characters ( as shown as the pic ) are very crisp.
3) sometimes because lightmap res are so bad, the shadow literally become non-visible.

anyway i've made a pic to show you the difference.

[degeneration]

Wow! Thanks frozenfire2. I'll have a stab at this this evening.