Difference between revisions of "Talk:Lighting"

Revision as of 02:13, 10 February 2010

Article Updates

Writing here as a scratch pad for topics that could probably go into the main page.

Character and level lights

There doesn't seem to be a strong emphasis about character vs. level lights. Reading it the first time it sounds like the difference might be between baked and static lights, but apparently there's a property field "Affects Characters" in the light's property sheet.

Looking at some of the Orzammar level layouts, it seems that the designers made some of the character lights have an incredibly large point radius for point static-lights to assumably light most of the level (100,000 in Orz000d.lvl to even the lava's 5,000,000 in Orz100d.lvl). I suppose the performance for doing that is OK and what matters is how many lights are overlapping or maybe other considerations...? These huge ones are also placed far out of the level, but that might just be for organization reasons given how large they are anyway.

Light Probes

Besides water, is there any easy way to know when you should place a light probe? In the Orzammar levels, they seem to be around lava, but that doesn't appear to be reflective. Armour doesn't seem to reflect things, so I'm not sure what they're being used for here.

Pointers for Num Samples

It seems some of the fires and other baked lights usually have about 20 for Num Samples, where the main article says that should make the shadows crisper. I'll have to play around with that to see the different results, but the levels have so-called "bounce lights" which might be worth writing about if they're a useful design concept.

Processing Time

There doesn't seem to be a lot of feedback from the toolset when it's still generating your lightmaps. If you get impatient and toggle showing them, then you might run into an error with temporary directories. For some bigger levels it takes my system about 6 minutes to finish them... I'm sure that'll will vary wildly. In the meantime, I've just opened the windows task manager as an assurance that the process is still running.

Lighting Bugs

OK, lighting is borked for creating new levels. Lets get some conversation going that doesn't get buried under endless posts about making characters bi and taking their clothes off :p I'll start by listing the bugs we have found so far.

1. The lightmap 'cracks' along chunk boundaries in terrain levels, producing unexplained shadows.
2. Sunlight doesn't work in terrain levels. An ambient light must be added
3. Water is broken in game. Looks fine in editor, but non-existent in game.

Reproduction Steps: All steps assume starting with a clean terrain level built with these options:

Base Steps

And all have the following basic steps:

1. Save the level
2. Add export area
3. Define area - set the green square to cover the entire mesh
4. Add a start point roughly in the center - Possible bug? If I add the start point before the area, path finding will not recognize it.
5. Set start point in export area
6. Click Render Lightmaps
7. Toggle Lightmap on and Fully Lit off to verify there is no light. This confirms bug 2, no sunlight. Unless I've missed where it says sunlight doesn't act like, well, sunlight.
8. Add a light roughly in center. Change type to Ambient, Postion.Z to 25
9. Toggle Lightmap off
10. Hit the Render Lightmap button
11. Toggle Lightmap back on to verify ambient is working. I have never seen lightmap cracking at this point.

Phew. And I don't really want to admit how many times I've gone through this.

Lightmap Cracking

This one is beating me. I cannot come up with a 100% sure-fire way to force cracking. This time it happened when I did a full local post for the second time. If someone can come up with repro steps, it would be much appreciated. Here's a screen shot of the cracked level. Edit: Messing around and noticed that the cracking happened again on the second Do All Local Posts. However it's 1am so further testing will have to wait.

Edit from Languard:Dug a hole and placed three baked point lights to light it up. After rendering lightmaps and before posting, the lightmaps cracked. Tried to reproduce but on the second time instead of cracking, one chunk became fully lit and completely unaffected by baked point lights.

Edit from Ainiana:In my experience the 'cracked' light map appears to occur when multiple baked lights are applied to the same exterior area. I have also have experienced the 'one chunk unaffected by baked point lights' on another occasion (this only took 1 baked light to reproduce). On all occasions water was not visible in game when testing (using the steps outlined below).

An example of a 'cracked' lightmap.

We've seen this internally as well, there appears to be a bug with how sunlight is handled. Our lightmapper guru has had the bug passed on to him so hopefully a fix will come along soon but at this point we don't know exactly what's wrong so we can't give any sort of estimate. BryanDerksen 17:49, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Lightmapping guru here: If anyone sees this happening, please send me the level via our support email. I have played around with sunlight with the lightmapper on my own machine and can not repro it here, so I need your help.

Update 11/24/09: Bug squashed! Head on over to http://social.bioware.com/social.bioware.com/project/717/ to get the new files (you will need the new eclipseray.exe binary)

No Water

1. Use the deform tool to dig a hole
2. Right-Click->Insert->New Water Mesh
3. Drag it over to the hole
4. Make it large enough to cover the hole
5. Right-Click->Insert->New Light Probe
6. Drag light probe so that is roughly centered on the water and slightly above it
7. Place some small oaks around for reflection
8. Render Lightmaps
9. Render Light Probes
10. Verify that yes, it looks correct
    
    
11. Do All Local Posts
12. Save and close level
13. Create new area, set level as layout
14. Add a waypoint
15. Override Export starting area
16. Get into game, verify that water is...missing

Please, if anyone else has anything to add to this, do so. The more info we can concentrate here, the easier it will be for BioWare to fix this :)

The missing water planes actually doesn't have anything to do with the light mapper, it's a separate system. We've got someone looking at that to see what's going on. BryanDerksen 23:51, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Found a workaround: Level editor#Water tools BryanDerksen 23:37, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Lightmapper Glitch

This glitch appears to be something to do with the configuration of the lightmapper or the script itself.

It was tested on a BioWare computer in an attempt to figure it out and appeared to work fine there. It may be packaged incorrectly, or there may of been a fault with the installation.

Compiling lightmaps appears to work before a certain amount of props have been added, after which this bug begins to appear. At first, I installed Python 2.6, after which I uninstalled that and installed 2.5. Could this of caused any problems?

~ Shadow180

New lightmapper

We've got a new lightmapper going up at the lightmapper project shortly that should hopefully fix a lot of the issues that have been reported above. Check it out and see if it solves things for you. (It won't solve the missing water plane issue, that's something separate that we're still investigating). BryanDerksen 23:51, 24 November 2009 (UTC)