Baking landscape lighting

anonymous_user_19d90b88 · March 9, 2015, 6:17pm

Hey guys,

I’m having a little trouble baking the lighting in my landscape. Thus far I have created an instanced material for the terrain, placed a lightmass importance volume around the entire level and every time i build the lighting I get these horrible shadows that just look like black blobs.
Whenever I try to increase the light resolution on the terrain to anything higher than 8 I get a error message. Has anyone got any ideas on how I can improve the shadows at all or tell me what this error means because I cannot make heads or tails of it.

Thanks in advanced

~Fury

anonymous_user_923c79df · March 9, 2015, 6:31pm

A resolution of 8 is a little bit too high ^^ -> what happens when you use 3-5?

anonymous_user_19d90b88 · March 9, 2015, 6:33pm

I get the same sort of effect as the bottom screen capture

EDIT: I have rebuilt the lighting on 1 to 5 and still block shadows.

anonymous_user_19d90b88 · March 9, 2015, 7:29pm

If anyone can shed some light (excuse the pun) I will be most grateful. This is for my university portfolio.

EDIT: I’ve tried recreating a whole new level from scratch. Literally just imported the landscape from heightmap, added material and built lighting… same result

anonymous_user_3f36203b · March 12, 2015, 5:59pm

Umm… I may be wrong. But I think you may just need to add a sky light.

For outdoor environments you should at least have one directional light, and one sky light to brighten up the shadows a little.

Hope this helps!

Sam_Deiter · March 12, 2015, 6:05pm

The error message is letting you know that you ran out of memory when trying to build the lighting.

anonymous_user_3f36203b · March 12, 2015, 6:10pm

Doh! I missed that.

Tim_Hobson · March 12, 2015, 6:32pm

Hey ,

Eric and I are working still on getting a lightmass trouble shooting and tips portion up on our Wiki Lighting Guide (linked in my signature). It’s a little slow going with all the other work we have going on at the moment, but it’s about halfway done at the moment.

Running out of memory is one of the more common ones though.

Lightmass is a very cpu intensive process, especially with landscapes and larger scenes. These scene typically will use dynamic lighting setups vs baked shadows.

I can see you’re already using a lightmass importance volume in the one pic you have so that’s a good start!

The best way around this is to increase your RAM in your computer. You could also increase the virtual memory cache for you computer as well so that when it runs out of RAM it will write to the hard drive. This is a way to help with this but this process is very slow when writing to the HDD though.

Anyway, keep an eye out as I hope to have this up soon!