Open and load level correcly! (4-26)

Hey!

When I will go from level to level I use “Open Level”. When I do so in bigger or levels with great lightning effects and textures they will not load correcly. My question is how can I open och load a level and know that everything it great when the level will be open.

Thanks!

Are you using static, stationary or dynamic lighting? If you’re using static or stationary you may need to build the lighting before you launch or it’ll look jacked up. This can take a long time and might not even build if your pc doesn’t have good specs.

If you’re getting the gray default material when opening a level on your assets and or landscape your level hasn’t compiled all the shaders. It will after some time during a PIE session. I believe I encountered this early on when I didn’t save out the level after it compiled while the level is open in the editor. Once it compiled save it and then it should play in editor without looking funky. Unless something else is going on… Maybe…

For the most part I use Static lightning. But in this level I use Dynamic in a fireplace for best shadows. When I load this level the fireplace shadows will not be so detail.

I have a RTX 3090, I9 CPU and 64 GB of ram.

Thats a tight rig so you shouldn’t have any issues with that. Maybe your asset materials have something going on in the shaders…? Maybe try and mess around with lit/unlit… The mesh I believe has some properties with regards to lighting in the class defaults where you can check/uncheck cast dynamic shadows, turn them on or off and also use cascaded shadows.

Shadows aren’t straight forward in my experience… The number of bounces, culling distance and atmospheric light all have a role in what it will look like. I believe it has to be in a post process volume to do that.

You can set one anywhere in the level and check unbound and that will allow it to encapsulate the entire level or you can place it over your fireplace explicitly… It honestly does some weird stuff when playing around with dynamic lighting I haven’t been able to explain so I take small steps and screen shot my settings before trying something that breaks the whole level’s lighting…