I have what appears to be a bug with regards to Baked Lighting information not moving with Sub Levels in the Persistent Level. This causes each SubLevel to have incorrect lighting information on the terrain/rooms and also causes all movable actors to appear jet black.
In the Editor I created a Level and named it “Hospital”
Then, I double-clicked the “Hospital” Level and Created:
Light-mass Volumes/Character Light Volumes as well as added static and movable Actors. Then I build lighting.
I created a Persistent Level and added this “Hospital” Sub Level into it. I changed the location of where this “Hospital” Sub Level exists in the Persistent World as well as other sub levels in my game.
Now I toggle Lighting visualizers to see where the light-mass is located and as you can see, it exists at the origin of the persistent level. Actually, all the sub-levels have their light-mass in the center of the persistent world which means none of my sub-levels are getting accurate lighting information at all.
I have read that in order to keep lights from other sub levels from rendering on top of each other, you need to build lighting (separately) in the sub level by itself. But if the baked lighting does not travel with the sub level’s new position, then this is a big problem because nothing looks correct. That means you can’t build a sub level separately and then add it later into a persistent level.
FYI, the persistent level does NOT have any lighting or geometry in it whatsoever, just trigger volumes. I feel like I should let everyone know that all sub levels look and feel different (they have different colors and lighting), and are meant to be all loaded once, and the player dynamically teleports seamlessly to each sub level with the level visibility toggled on/off whenever the player completes a task. Because there are trigger volumes that dictate gameplay, I can’t have overlapping sub levels which is why I need them to be somewhere else entirely.
I also wanted to say that I was able to replicate this issue on a clean project 4.18. I added small sub levels into a persistent one and added an offset and built lighting separately. Each sub level had all of it’s lightmass data in the center of the map.
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There is no official way to fix it (at least not that I’ve found) as the light-mass still doesn’t work as expected even in 4.20.3. I can describe how we tried to at least hide some of it. This may or may not work for your game/project.
Note:
Our game plays a lot like some of the newer horror titles you’d find on Steam where objects can be picked up and inspected/rotated in place.
In maps that have movable objects (like the drawer in the office) that absolutely needed lighting applied to it as it translated back and forth, we created small movable lights that have their own light channel (ex. channel 1)
The inspect-able object would tick the same light channel (ex. channel 1) and we’d adjust the brightness of the light enough so it doesn’t appear as black anymore.
Notice the drawer is still kinda darker than the rest of the static objects around it. Normally, a character volume would solve this issue, but unfortunately, because of the streaming level bug, all that light-mass data is missing because it’s at the origin of the persistent map and not at the streaming level map. It also sucks that we have to add movable lights because they have additional performance costs.
I’m sorry, I wish I had a better work-around for this. =(
we are also working on a horror project and we have movable doors and drawers which are totally black after build.
if you move and rotate each level from inside it ( select all assets then move or rotATE some where you want it to be in its persistent level which in our case is the world map where all levels are there as sublevels) instead of moving levels using level details panel. and then create a “build map” per level and add a level to it and build then when you open the world map those sublevels with their build data will be there correctly . for example a build map named hospital_build then add hospital to it and build lights then add hospital to the world. it can solve some of your current issues then you can remove movable lights and get a better result. our current problem now is more complex than yours i think.
when using light visualizer it only shows us light data of only one level I mean if have two levels loaded then light visualizer shows only one of them and in runtime when a we want to load another map its indirect light appears in the current level and makes all movables dark.
i said create a build map per level I meant per atmosphere. if you have a house and each room has its level then you must have house_build map and add the entire house to it and build
I was going to report it oh so long ago, but I decided it was too much of a hassle to report issues to Epic using their new bug submission form, especially since I was incredibly detailed and thorough on this AnswerHub page. Took me a whole day to take photos and write it all up. Also, there’s no communication anymore so I felt like I would never know if things got fixed or not. =D
I’m the environment and lighting artist working on Shadow_Knights_'s project. I think we already resolved the issue in a different way. We had our issue before the volumetric option was introduced to the engine so that does not seem to have an effect on the problem in our case. We found that once the project was “launched” as a proper standalone game that the issue with movable objects appearing black no longer manifested. There was another issue related to lighting where light would appear to flicker on movable objects as if the engine couldn’t tell whether the object should be shadowed or not. It seemed that changing movable objects to skeletal meshes resolved that problem.
Hey there,
in our Project we load, move and rotate a sublevel instance into the mainlevel via Blueprint.
We use UE 4.25.4 and testet the “Volumetric Lightmaps” and have also a problem with the mentioned “Spars Volume Lighting Sample”. The Baked Lighting is only within the first roomposition and don’t move to the other position beside the start position of 0.0.0.
Mainmap with the Sublevel (Instances) Startposition in the center
