I have a large open world scene that I want to keep to static lighting for performance. My foliage light bake is acting very strange depending on the material it is applied to. Below shows the foliage turns black as the material starts to transition from sand to rock.
The issue doesn’t seem to be purely during light build. I tried to cheat it by building lighting with sand applied to the whole landscape, then switching materials and keeping the lighting. But if I switch materials then save and reopen the file the foliage comes back in as black.
To be clear the comparison above is WITH THE SAME LIGHT BUILD. The change in the foliage appearance was only caused by changing the landscape material and reopening the file.
Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated, this issue is massively holding back my project. I hope I’m just an idiot and this is something simple.
It’s probably a feature of the material in use.
open up the material of the plant and have a look. If you dont find anything that would cause the color variation within the material, post a screenshot of it.
Not seeing anything that would cause variation like that to my knowledge
There is the speedtree variation, but I think that’s only variation between plants, not landscape material. Another thing is the plants show up dark in the detail lighting pass, which I think is unaffected by base color. Let me know if you want close-ups of any other parts of the material.
It’s probably taking color from the landscape, it’s definitely not using a basic material
In what areas should I be looking for foliage getting color from the landscape?
Just did another build with a very simple white material on foliage.
If you’re going to test materials, it’s going to continue to contain the baked lighting from before so it’s not going to look quite right unless you build lighting again
I did rebuild the lighting after assigning the basic white material
What about the mesh itself? Does it have only 1 material?
The Albedo in the screenshot above should be what affects the coloring.
the very first entry with the red texture thing might be what actually affects the coloring.
creating a material instance would show you exactly what options you have avaliable btw.
my current guess is that there is more then 1 material involved.
Either way, it is wierd enough that if you could share the mesh and material asset I would like to try and replicate the issue.
Are you using the Grass type or painting it on manually?
The Mesh is only 1 material.
The material is something I built, and I’m using a texture instance applied to the material, but even if turned to pure white it still has a dark splocky appearance.
I did a test where I baked the lighting with a very basic white material, that was the image above. You can see even with the white material the shadows are very dark.
Normally dark shadows on baked lighting would be a combination of Uv’s and the lightmap resolution. But I’ve done tests with multiple UV setups and the lightmap set to 1024, and saw no difference.
I can get the lighting to build correctly but only when it is above a surface with a simple shader. What’s also strange is if I change the landscape material the lightmap doesn’t change(as expected) however when I save the file and reopen it the foliage is dark. The dark appearance of the foliage is not changed even when I change material to white.
The mesh is a quixel asset so I can’t share
I’m noticing now sometimes when I open the file the foliage looks correct, other times it’s dark. So the same file not resaved or changed in any way has different looking foliage at different times.
Seems like a bug to me
