Endless lightmass building when making latest UDK portable.

[Graylord]

Hi, I prefer to do my work straight in a dropbox folder so that it's instantly accessible and constantly backed up automatically.
So far, I've had no issues making UDK portable by simply moving it to where I want and making a shortcut to the new location.

However, there seems to be an issue with doing this with the latest build. My lightmass builds never finish, they get stuck and count up endlessly around 95% and above.
One scene got to 98.7% after about twelve minutes. After 72 hours, it was still at 98.7%, similar things happen to other light builds.
It is as if it can build properly, but struggles to finish it up and save it.

One thing I just realized, is there a maximum lightmap resolution?
It's an archviz scene, so I want everything to be as crisp and high res as possible. Performance and size isn't an issue.
One of my bigger models (Most of the plain surface area of the building) ended up being a bit muddy at 4096 resolution, so I increased it to 8192 (I know this is a ridiculous size, but build time and performance isn't relevant), and when I think about it, I haven't built the light since I did that.
Could that be the cause?

[majic12]

From one hand maybe the latest udk version is not the best one.When you install udk,you install it on your pc and than move the folder to a usb hard disk right?Maybe installing the udk direktly on to the hard disk in the usb?
On the other hand what is the lightmap resolution of your meshes?Even a building coud use a ligt map resolution of 128.The higher you go the longer build tims you get.I supose you are bumping the light map to a big number in order to get nice shadowing.Leave the building with a light map resolution of lets say 128.If you have a dominant directional light in the scene go in to the light component>whole scene dynamic shadow radius and start bumping this.It will make the shadows crispy depending on how far are you from the model.Use round numbers like 1000,2000,3000...but be careful as this eats framerate.On the other hand you coud convert your static mesh buildings to interpactors(with a block all collision)as interpactors are lighted/shaded in a difrent way than statick meshes and see if that helps you.

4k-8k textures are not a good idea.In order for someone to notice that he will have to be playing the level in a 2k resloution and up and most peoples screens these days are still 1920x1080/1200 max.Make the textures 2k and i photoshop just apply a standart sharpen filter to them to perserve the detail.