Level Design Ambient Lighting and StaticMeshes

[Murphy]

Hi,
is there anything one can do against the bug that StaticMeshes are affected by ambient lighting aka zone lighting twice as much as bsp?

 

[jeffduquette]

You probably know these tricks already, but for other folks reading the thread you can sometimes get static meshes to look a bit better – or at least different -- in ambient light via one of the two approaches I indicate below. These don’t always make static meshes look better as it will depend upon your sunlight actor (actors) settings, brightness, saturation, as well as your fog color settings.

1) Static Mesh Properties > Display > unlit > try setting it to true and see if it improves the look of the mesh.
2) I think it is under the static mesh lighting properties or light color -- but you can set the mesh to be special lit. I think it is special lit and "true". As I recall when you select special lit, the static mesh only reacts to those sunlight actors specifically designated as special light sunlight actors. This is a two step deal as you need to monkey with the special lit sunlight actor settings as well as the static mesh settings.

Ambient light is so tricky and subtle in how it interacts with both BSP and static meshes and the level as a whole. It's really an art. There are some levels you enter and the designer has made the lighting so kewl you just have to play. Than there are other levels you enter and the lighting destroys the players sense of game immersion right from the get go. One of the most cool light settings I have seen is in Partisan Forest -- or Partisan Raid or some such thing. It is a small map with a night setting. Fire light and moving clouds through a high tree canopy, headlights etc. Very-Very well done.

I can spend hours upon hours looking at various sunlight + fog color + sky box fog color + sky box lighting + saturation. And it never seems to look the same in the SDK as it does in actual game play. I find myself having to rebuild the light settings constantly and than look at the lighting changes on the level in practice mode. Where does the time go...well it all goes bye-bye trying to get lighting to look sort of natural.

 

[Murphy]

Thanks for the suggestions, Jeff, but in my case I can't use unlit as I still want them to react to lighting. I just don't want them to be brightened up by ambient lighting twice. Besides, I'm only using the ambient lighting to make shadows not appear too black. Even with it applied to the StaticMeshes twice they aren't as bright as when they are unlit.
SpecialLit doesn't have any effect on ambient lighting as it seems. It only applies to actual lights. This might be because I'm mapping for UT2004 and not for RO though.


If you applied the -nogamma argument to your UnrealEd short-cut so it doesn't overbrighten your OS environment while it's active try to run it without that. The game changes the brightness too and if you don't allow UnrealEd to do this, UnrealEd and the game will look different.
If you didn't do this and it still looks wrong, open the game, go to the display menu and check the values for brightness, contrast and gamma. Now close the game, open UnrealEd and try the following into the little console line in the bottom left:
BRIGHTNESS X
CONTRAST X
GAMMA X
With x being the value the respective setting has in-game. Confirm every line with enter. My UnrealEd 3d viewport looks exactly like in-game (except for things that are hidden in-game or hidden in UnrealEd, of course). It's still a p.i.t.a. to get the lighting look good but at least you won't have to check in-game anymore then.

 

[UncleDrax]

The work around that I think almost all RO maps does to the 'dark shadow' thing, especially since RO is almost exclusively outdoor enviroments, is you setup multiple sunlights.

One (the brightest) is your 'actual' sun.
Then setup 1 or 2 at appropriate angles with much less brightness to act as basically 'softeners' or 'light reflections'.

then you can use a really low ambient light value just to keep a few of the odd spaces from being pitch-black.


If you're doing Interior enviroments, as is usually what you see in UT, then you can just drop various Light objects in your rooms, used with a combination of zone lighting to generate almost any effect you need.

 

[worluk]

if nothing works out, use negative lights

 

[Murphy]

If you're doing Interior enviroments, as is usually what you see in UT, then you can just drop various Light objects in your rooms, used with a combination of zone lighting to generate almost any effect you need.

Yes, I would have needed it for an indoor area. Hm. I guess I'll go back to placing individual low-brightness lights again to illuminate things a bit.

if nothing works out, use negative lights

Haha, I don't think using negative lights to cancel out overlitness of StaticMeshes is worth the time and effort. On a similar note though, it would be great if StaticMeshes would accept a negative Ambient Glow value.
It's really a shame. Ambient Lighting would work so well. How come that bug was never fixed?

 

[worluk]

i guess it has something to do with quite a lot people being not in favour of ambient at all. If i remember correctly for example Goatswood came without or with only a very small amount of ambient lighting. I remember opening it in the editor and seeing one billion light actors ^^

 

[Murphy]

In my opinion ambient lighting is a great way to primitively simulate refracting light without much hassle. People who used it exclusively without or with insufficient conventional lighting, be it sunlights or just plain regular lights, may have given it a bad reputation, but in my opinion it would be a very valuable tool if it worked properly.

I tried to use a ConstantColor as an "OverlayMaterial" for my StaticMeshes, hoping I could use that to cancel out the additional lighting they incorrectly recieve from the zone lighting but it didn't do anything. Is this a dead function or did I do something wrong?