R Soul on 4/2/2024 at 21:45

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I've been making some mountains, and had exclusively used terrain, but in order to reduce cell count and make it look better I've been simplifying the terrain and placing objects along the top. For some of them I've had quite a bit of trouble getting them to be affected by sunlight.
This shows how it was after tweaking the terrain underneath them (the red rectangle shows terrain which was due to be deleted and replaced (read on for more detail):
http://catmanofiowa.com/RSoul/img/lit_objects_old_terrain.jpg

Then I removed some of the terrain shown in the red box and also began replacing that with objects. After doing that, two of the original objects went dark, even though none of recent demolition work has affected the brushes underneath them:
http://catmanofiowa.com/RSoul/img/dark_objects.jpg

The whole area starts with a large FillAir brush. When I reduced the time value to 0, even more objects went dark:
http://catmanofiowa.com/RSoul/img/dark_objects_time_adjusted.jpg

A final thing I tried was splitting the large brush into 4 smaller ones. Most of the objects became lit again but one of them stubbornly remained dark.

I've gone into game mode and flown around the dark object(s) and the light gem is also dark, but I should definitely be getting the sunlight on me (open space, well above all terrain and objects).

My concern, despite the time required to get all objects lit up properly, is how delicate this is. One brush tweak any any part of the mission could once again make some of these objects go dark, so I'd appreicate any advice on how to manage this issue. I also tried removing all the terrain brushes from this area, then all objects became lit up again, which suggests a reduction in cell count is the way to go, but if that is the case I'm not sure if I could preserve enough of what I want, so I'm hopeful that someone has found some building technique or maybe even an obsure Dromed command that could help.

Edit:
Here's a video showing things, and the beginning of a solution. See the text below for further info:
[video=youtube_share;R5O5WEloYiA]https://youtu.be/R5O5WEloYiA[/video]

Some insight - I think sunlight is only being generated if there's terrain within a certain distance of the cell. The reasoning is that so far, all terrain has been lit properly. That's why deleting the 'step' in the video fixed the object; it brought some terrain close enough to the centre of the object. Some further building work and new object placement caused more dark objects/cells, so I placed some solid terrain just below their centres and they all became properly illuminated. I'm not sure that's the whole story though, as some terrain changes caused different objects to go dark. Could it be that this sunlight rationing starts above a certain cell ID?

R Soul on 17/4/2025 at 21:30

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The closest I got to a solution was to create narrow square pillars inside each object, reaching up to just below the centre point (to allow rendering). That seemed to bring back the illumination of the objects. I can't remember if it fixed every single one but it's certainly an approach worth trying.

I deleted all of that outside terrain becuase even when everything was illuminated, all the time and effort of trying to make things look good (with no meaningful progress), dealing with cell complexity and count was just becoming too draining. And I would get different results when area brushes were active as they created a different worldrep.