Hey all, I have some actors that, when placed as static meshes, look just fine in engine, but I am spawning them procedurally which requires that they be dynamic meshes and they are appearing entirely black in Mobile Preview (meshes have non-overlapping UVs, lightmass importance, etc).
I have read that Dynamic Shadows in Mobile Preview is currently broken or on the backlog for updates? Is that correct? I have tried turning off dynamic shadows, I don’t really care what it looks like, just that I can see my meshes in mobile preview. Is there a way to disable this bad lighting or implement some lighting solution so that I can be testing my levels in mobile preview until this issue is resolved? Is there another issue at hand here?
I just tested ‘Play in New Editor Window’ instead of Mobile Preview and the dynamic patterns are rendering normally. This is definitely a Mobile Preview issue. Is there any way to light dynamic meshes and see them in Mobile Preview??
I found some more people asking about this and after some digging, found the answer: Lightmass Volume spawns Lighting Samples at set intervals. Lightmass automatically generates these on static mesh surfaces but dynamic meshes use the automatically generated samplers. If your Lightmass Volume is too small for your LIV to create any lighting samples, your dynamic patterns will appear black. Make your Lightmass Volume much larger than necessary (mine worked wonderfully at 10,000x10,000x10,000 but it appears that even that size is larger than necessary, I will examine perf repercussions later).
tl;dr Make your Lightmass Importance Volume large enough to produce a number of lighting samples. Visualize these by clicking in your top left viewport: Show > Visualize > Volume Lighting Samples
I’ve been struggling with lighting dynamic objects too. After a fair amount of research I came across the post below. I think this information is fairly important and should be stated more clearly in the documentation for mobile.
“Only one dynamic directional light is supported on mobile. The spot light or point lights won’t light anything that is dynamic/moveable in the scene, they’ll only impact baked lighting.”
If you try and light any dynamic objects with anything other than a directional light (moveable or stationary) the object will remain unlit.
A better solution than scaling up the Lightmass importance volume could be to set “World Settings > Lightmass > Volume Light Sample Placement Scale” to 0.1 for example, which decreases the distance of the samples to each other.
But thanks alot for the hint at the visualization of the samples!