Basic lighting questions

Development Rendering
1

Hello I popped up a fresh copy of the FPS example and started playing around with adding and moving around some BSP boxes.

I think both of my problems are related. First problem is that the shadows don’t seem to affect the character’s arms or the gun when he walks underneath them. I’m not sure if this is because of lightmapping or not, but I plan to have a level with extensive underground and above ground areas, and it would be a shame to need dynamic lighting for all of those objects that are underground to block the light. I have one directional light marked stationary, the sun, should be default settings.

In light: ://i.imgur/uiXnSGO.png
In shadow: ://i.imgur/AeYwOhd.png

Second problem is that the lens flare is still activated through the box and I don’t know why. Basically the sun is behind that box and it’s acting as if there’s nothing between the sun (directional light) and the player.
://i.imgur/aIllie9.png

2

Lens flare are definitely not from the sun. Those are from hands/gun reflections(because of ur first problem)

I’m not sure about the shadows, but I think that something to do with Hands Skeletal mesh. You can notice, that other dynamic objects or staticmesh components inside MyCharacter receive shadows properly. This may be a bug but I’m not sure :slight_smile:

3

For the shadows -> open your character bp - go to the component tab - click onto the Mesh1P - search for shadow - enable “Cast Shadow” + “Cast Dynamic Shadow” :slight_smile:

4

The issue is not casting shadows, but receiving them. (For the sake of science, I tested your suggestion and it had no effect)

5

But have you enabled both? + what happens when you test it in the example map -> because in my case it works ^^

test.jpg
test.jpg800×342 37.6 KB

6

Oh I did not see the part where you mentioned “cast dynamic shadow”. That does indeed make it work! However the problem is being just arms, there’s a ghostly floating arm shadow (although that can be fixed by making a complete model I suppose)

Anyway, it should still work with Cast Shadows enabled (and not dynamic) should it not? Because cast shadows seems like it is supposed to work with lightmapping. Maybe it is a bug? I don’t have another version of the engine installed (just 4.6.1) so I can’t test the behavior in previous versions for a while.

Or perhaps I am misunderstanding how the shadows from BSP is cast? If it is dynamic then sure I could see this being my fault! I will have to do some more experimentation in the near future.