Lights Help

[Naarshakta]

Hi everybody.

I was working on my last Map and I notice something weird with the lights.
Okay I'm discovering UnrealEngine and I'm sure this problem is common but if someone can give me some informations, links or documents (I have the 'Mastering Unreal Technology' books ) to understand this phenomenon with the lights and make it not happens it will help me a lot !

Look the problem :








Thanks for all future responses !

[Cr4zy]

It's down to meshes or BSP not being evenly lit. Or because you're using vortex lighting on the meshes instead of lightmaps, if its BSP your light map resolution isn't high enough.

You can override the mesh vErtex lighting in its properties by enabling lightmap override and setting the light map to something like 256 or 512. If its BSP you can change its properties to edit lightmap resolution default is 32 a setting of 8 is usually fine for most things.

[shot]http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/6158/lightsv.jpg[/shot]

[Odedge]

Or because you're using vortex lighting on the meshes instead of lightmaps, if its BSP your light map resolution isn't high enough.

With "vortex" lighting, all of the light gets sucked away from your map!

*Odedge run's away*

[Cr4zy]

With "vortex" lighting, all of the light gets sucked away from your map!

*Odedge run's away*

!! I typed that on my phone, apparently vertex isn't a real word

Spellcheck on phones is useless.

[Naarshakta]

Yeah, thiz rox thanks a lot.

I mostly use Static meshes and I tried to override lightmap as you said and it works.

Question more, if I do this for ALL staticmeshes, the light build may be really long but it will not change anything when playing the map and I will get much better lights than I get now. Am I right ?

Thanks for helping !

[Elcrolonosios]

I think your map will take more time to be loaded for the first time ingame, and will be heavier (i mean larger file size, and more important required graphic resources).

[Cr4zy]

Lightmaps on all your meshes can work for better or for worse. If the lightmap is a small enough resolution it will actually load/render faster then a vertex lit mesh not that I can remember the calculation to figure it out.

But in most cases light maps will be a high resolution, so build times increase and the map uses more video memory in runtime.

if you want lights to look better I'd suggest you only increase lightmaps in places where shadows are being cast

[Odedge]

If you check my signature, there is a link to my UT 3 tutorial list. There are a few nice tuts on the subject.

Also keep in mind that not all static meshes have support for lightmaps. They need to have 2 UV maps (second one is normally used for lightmaps).

[TKBS]

I got major visual improvements, with little or no loss of FPS, after spending a considerable amount of time checking my lightmap resolutions on 'dead areas' and meshes, that were out of direct light sources [directional etc].

After the final 'tweaks' and 'lightmap resolution' applications (on BSP aswel) my file size actually got smaller, but the build time took alot longer.- hardly any FPS loss with large visual improvements ingame


The tweaking guide might help if you would like to get optimum performance

[stevelois]

Check my sign, I have a tut that cover the lighting subject

[Naarshakta]

Thanks everybody for all informations !!