Whammy
September 27, 2015, 2:52am
1
I’m having trouble building a level with foliage. I have a large outdoor level with 90K shrubs. The lightmap resolution is set to a puny 4 on the meshes. When I try to build the level, it fails complaining that the foliage actor lightmap is too big. Is there a way to fix this? Perhaps breaking the foliage up into multiple actors?
Make sure to take a look at this thread: https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?68384-Lightmap-too-large-warnings
Hi Polka Tuba,
Take a look at the documentation here, specifically the Lighting section: https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/Foliage/index.html#staticmeshsettings
You will see that it details a little bit of information about the Lightmap Resolution for Foliage and how it is grouped.
Each instance that is painted in the Foliage Tool is not getting it’s own lightmap.
In the Foliage tool, go to Show Instance Settings > Lighting > Cast Static Shadows > Enable Lightmap Resolution and leave at a default of 8. Possibly raise it to 16 if you don’t like the results.
I wouldn’t go much higher than that, but do keep it at a power of two for the resolution.
As you mention, you could always ignore the warning, but it is just that. It’s a warning that there could be issues. Larger Lightmap resolutions mean larger texture size that is loaded which can lead to a bottleneck in streaming those in thus leading to performance issues.
Lowering the resolution would also help in your build times as well.
