I am trying to create an architecture visualisation for iPhone. Please see the attaches photos to see the problem I am facing.
The lighting was built in Production Quality.
My device profile for iPhone 6 Plus is:
[iPhone6Plus DeviceProfile]
+CVars=r.MobileContentScaleFactor=2
Actually I have tried 0, 1 & 1.5 as values with no change.
Can somebody tell me what am I missing?
Thanks in advance!
Best I can guess is that it’s something to do with texture compression settings.
Thanks for your reply. Do you mean the per texture setting? For all my textures Compression is set to TC_Default or TC_Normal
But in the screenshots above the wall, which is affected the most, has not texture applied. Just a simple material with an RGB color as its Base Color.
I haven’t messed with iOS building, but there’s probably a setting somewhere for texture compression for iOS. The issue is the compression on the lightmaps.
MobileContentScaleFactor has to do with the resolution that the device is using, if i remember correctly. For example, Retina displays report that they use half the resolution they really have. So setting that scale factor to 2 forces it to use every pixel. Having it at 1 would essentially cut your resolution and improve performance, and often looks just fine. But it doesn’t affect the actual content of your scene, like these lightmaps.
It is totally a compression issue, but luckily I’ve just had some experience with this. iOS (and other mobile devices?) uses PVR texture compression instead of your PC’s DXT. By default, the PVR compression is set to a fast mode so that you can quickly test your game. Go to Project Settings > Cooker and set your Default PVRTC quality to 4 to get maximum quality compression. This took my iOS deployment about 20 minutes compared to the 5 minutes it took with the compression quality set to 0, but the results are pretty impressive.
I actually just started a thread about this because I want to use the PVR lightmaps in my HTML5 build, because they are better than whatever the web version uses. Go to my thread and go to the image I posted to see my iOS lightmaps I currently have. They are pretty close to the PC version.
It is lightmap compression which can be disabled in config files if you search google you should find it - can’t remember now where it is, but it will boost your light maps a lot.
Lightmap compression can be turned off by putting bCompressLightmaps=False in DefaultLightmass.ini.
There is also a checkbox under World Settings -> Lightmass called Compress Lightmaps, which I suppose you can uncheck and have the same results.
None of the above helped my situation. Maybe I did something wrong… E.g. Do I need to rebuilt lighting after changing it? I did not.
Anyway…
I am currently trying @StephaBon’s solution, but cooking with PVRTC set to 4 is taking ages in my project. Its going for more than 3 hours now (with a value of 0 it was around 15 minutes).
I will let you know of the results when it is finished.
…and yes!!! Cooking is finished and the results are amazing!
Setting PVRTCQuality under Cooker settings of my project to a value of 4 created perfect lightmaps on the iPhone!
Its amazing to be able to see such an amount of photorealism on a mobile device.
I hope I will be able to share my project with you guys soon.
Thanks to all for the amazing community and for the time you’ve put to look into my problem!