Lighting issues on different faces

[EmeraldTiger]

Hello, I am new to the Epic Games forums and UT3 in general. I was wanting to get into UDK / UE3 and figured a good place to start would be to design for UT3. (I know the UT3 editor isn't the same as UDK, but close enough, and I'm not a big-time dev yet anyway) I have done community work for Quake III Arena though, which you can find at my portfolio, EmeraldProductions: http://emeraldproductions.weebly.com/

I'm experimenting with the editor and so far seem to be getting the hang of things, but I'm having the hardest time dealing with lighting - it's probably both easier and harder than GTKRadiant as far as lighting is concerned. Easier in that I get to see the results in the editor, harder as in how lighting responds differently to different faces.

Basically I have a hallway which has two sides cut into different faces thanks to some brush deintersection to avoid overlapping. (Is this a bad editing practice?) Unfortunately, lighting gets screwed up as a result of illuminating different faces. This doesn't sound very intuitive in text, so here's a few screenies:




As you can see in the first pic the lighting stops abruptly in the middle of the hallway. The second screen shows that it's due to a different face.

Is there a way to get the lighting to illuminate all of the hallway, without having to do messy face-combining, etc.? Back when I used Radiant different brushes / faces were lighted just fine, but it seems UE3 has qualms about lighting differing faces. Thanks in advance.

[Odedge]

Welcome to the forums and Unreal mapping. I did some Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy mapping back in the day (never published anything) and I know it can be a challenge to learn the new system.

My philosiphy with brush work is Keep It Simple Stupid (no offense to you though ). If your BSP gets messy (not snapped to the grid, too much intersecting, etc), you will not only have bad lighting, you can run into BSP errors (invisible collision, hall of mirrors).

I don't use any intersecting/deintersecting. The most I have done is maybe some extrusion, but not much. That being said...

For what I can see in your hallway, each hallway should be it's own subtractive brush and should not intersect each other, but should "snap" to each other. This way, each wall will have a continuous face to be lit.

Another example would placing a window in a wall. In Radiant, you had to have 4 brushes (each wall on the side and a brush above and below the window). In Unreal, you only need 2 or 3 (depending on what style you are using). If you were going to cut a hole into something, it's better to cut that whole with a subtractive brush rather than building it with multiple additive brushes.

The one thing you should definitely get comfortable with is subtractive brushes. This took me some time to really get after a couple of years of using only additive brushes.

With UT 3 you should always start a map as an "additive' map (which means there is nothing in the map). A "subtractive" map actually puts a HUUUUUUUUUUGE additive brush that covers the entire mapping grid, which can cause a couple of issues.

For primarily indoor maps, you will need to add some additive geometry, then start subtracting away from it. For primary outdoor maps (depending on if you have "rooms" in it), you might be able to get away with just using additive brushes (for walls and flooring).

If you want, you can send me the map and I can take a look at it and maybe give you an example of how I would do it, so you can compare the two. Also, check out my signature for a link to my tutorial list which will help you in your UT 3 mapping.

[EmeraldTiger]

I sent a PM with the map your way. Thanks for your kind words.

[Odedge]

I received your PM and sent one back (in case you don't get notified with PMs).