rujuro on 28/3/2005 at 16:05
Has anyone else encountered a situation where you are clearly standing in a bright light, but the lightgem doesn't reflect this? I am wondering if it's related to the issues I discovered regarding lights that are only near static meshes, but no actual brushwork, since I'm encountering it on a very large bridge (all static mesh). Anyone seen anything similar?
Gestalt on 28/3/2005 at 18:27
I've had the opposite, where I'm standing in deep shadow and the light gem says it's bright. Not sure what to do about either.
OrbWeaver on 28/3/2005 at 20:50
Quote Posted by Gestalt
I've had the opposite, where I'm standing in deep shadow and the light gem says it's bright. Not sure what to do about either.
Use property LightLevel -> LightLevel Bias (or similarly-named) on the light. I don't know what scale it uses, but setting it to 0 makes the light-gem a lot darker when standing near the light.
Mandrake on 29/3/2005 at 01:12
Quote Posted by rujuro
Has anyone else encountered a situation where you are clearly standing in a bright light, but the lightgem doesn't reflect this? I am wondering if it's related to the issues I discovered regarding lights that are only near static meshes, but no actual brushwork, since I'm encountering it on a very large bridge (all static mesh). Anyone seen anything similar?
I know exactly what causes this - it happens with static meshes where you have it set not to cast a shadow (the default) and you stand in a place where you WOULD have been in shadow, had the static mesh been casting a shadow.
For some reason the lightgem algorithm thinks you're standing in a shadow even though the shadow casting of the intervening object is visibly disabled.
To test my theory, try enabling the CastShadows property on any nearby static meshes that could potentially cast a shadow to that spot, (your bridge) and see if there are actually shadows cast in the spot where the anomoly is.
As to what to do to fix it, thats a tough one. You could of course enable shadow casting on those static meshes, but you take a performance hit. I'm not sure if there is a way to make the lightgem not register a shadow when a static mesh is set not to cast a shadow...
On the other hand, the lightgem is just pointing out that the visible lighting in that area is incorrect due to the lack of shadowcasting....
rujuro on 29/3/2005 at 01:33
Unfortunately it can't be that, since the bridge DOES cast shadows and the light is located directly above the bridge. When Garrett is on the bridge and directly under the light, the gem remains unlit. I'm going to test a few things and will let you know what I find out.
rujuro on 29/3/2005 at 02:16
So the brush issue was it. When I placed a brush inside my static mesh so that it was within the radius of the light, the light gem began to light up properly. Lights seem to need nearby brush surfaces to operate correctly.
