Level Design Force Dynamic Lighting, no shadows

[Dziga Vertov]

So I'm trying to make a map where all the lighting is dynamic, which works really well in the editor, but it seems that whenever I test the map in the game itself there are no dynamic shadows at all. I've tried checking a bunch of boxes and pretty much lost track of them, but I know at some point I have set all statics to "no precomputed" and turned on force dynamic lighting. There has to be some big thing that I am missing.

 

[Beskar Mando]

Probably because they do not have bCastDynamicShadow set to true. Which is not the default(Default is false). Also dynamic lighting is a no-no for static meshes. There's very little need for dynamic lighting on an RS/RO2 map. For performance reasons dynamic lighting isn't used, instead unreal "cheats" and makes a texture to apply to the area. So lighting doesn't need to be computed real time which would eat up far too much memory and CPU power. To give you an idea why do you think it takes so much time and resources to build light map textures...
If you want nice lights use skylights, and set the Dominant light to cast shadow maps (I don't remember which is the default). Use of Fog and the lighting channels is also something to look at. As well as Epic's tutorials and Guides, as well as third party ones.

 

[Dziga Vertov]

Ah, well the reason I was hoping to use dynamic shadows was that it seemed to me that they were much sharper and cleaner, and I specifically designed the map with dynamic shadows in mind from an fps perspective. In the editor with only dynamic shadows on and in pie I get above 60 fps). But I guess if they are disabled in the engine then there is little I can do.

 

[nymets1104]

Hey I had a similar problem on Caen trying to get the moving cloud shadows on the terrain. Worked in SDK but not in game. Turns out Graphics settings had to be on Ultra for it to work in game. This was with the standard Dom Directional Light so not sure if it would work for a dynamic one.

 

[Beskar Mando]

Yeah, now that I think about it that's probably the reason. Dynamic shadows probably aren't enabled unless on ultra, which makes sense.

 

[Dziga Vertov]

Yeah, although I run everything on Ultra. I just ended up taking your suggestion though and it turned out better in the end. The thing I am constantly relearning is that you cannot force the SDK to do anything it does not want to do. The SDK giveth, and the SDK taketh away.

 

[Beskar Mando]

Or it crashes your computer (not the editor the actual computer, first ****ing time this has ever happened to me.) due to lack of RAM and I have 16GB, was trying to load the new Taman1941 map.

 

[Sven71]

Please do NOT attempt to load Taman at the moment. I somehow screwed brewing.

 

[Beskar Mando]

Please do NOT attempt to load Taman at the moment. I somehow screwed brewing.

Yeah, I crashed my computer, somehow. I noticed a **** ton of shaders being compiled, which might be part of the reason, or at least a clue, like a lot of stuff that shouldn't be even needed to be compiled, unless you had custom hit decals, and the like?

 

[Sven71]

Yeah, I crashed my computer, somehow. I noticed a **** ton of shaders being compiled, which might be part of the reason, or at least a clue, like a lot of stuff that shouldn't be even needed to be compiled, unless you had custom hit decals, and the like?

It's running now. Unsubscribe the old Taman entry and subscribe to Taman1941_ROE and Taman1941_UPK respectively.
A test server is up at:
IP: 108.61.98.205
port: 7777

TE_Taman1941 Territories

 

[Sven71]

Yeah, although I run everything on Ultra. I just ended up taking your suggestion though and it turned out better in the end. The thing I am constantly relearning is that you cannot force the SDK to do anything it does not want to do. The SDK giveth, and the SDK taketh away.

Have you been able to set up dynamic shadowing for your map in the meantime?

 

[Dziga Vertov]

No, but I think it isn't really a huge benefit anyways. The result with the static included actually seems better to me now.