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Foliage Lighting Woes

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robert.briscoe polycounter lvl 8
Hi all!

So i've been repeatedly banging my head against a wall for the past two days trying to get my custom foliage model to light properly with the instanced foliage paint tools. Basically all I wanted to do is use a non-directional lighting mode and disable shadows on the foliage so that it will better blend in with the landscape materials at a later date (I dont want the grass to fade out to reveal big black baked in shadows!) The problem is, when using MLM_NonDirectional in the material settings it goes completely wonky when lighting is baked. At first I thought it was an issue with my mesh, but everything seems to be in order, and it bakes perfectly fine as a normal static mesh:
G3zJu.jpg

This led me to believe there might be an incompatibility with using MLM_NonDirectional and the foliage instancing together, so I tried switching to MLM_Phong instead, and edited the mesh so that all of the normals point straight up (reproducing the same lighting effect) However the results were the same: worked perfectly as a normal static mesh, failed in instanced foliage mode.

So far i've tried the following to try and fix it:
  • changed the lightmaps value in the mesh to 0 to try and force vertex lighting - but it ends up completely black using both NonDirectional and Phong
  • checked the lightmap uvs were ok - they were fine
  • tried automatically generating lightmap uvs in the static mesh viewer - no change

EDIT: just tried it with just a normal cube - the issue is still there! Out of curiosity I then tried turning cast shadows back on in the static mesh properties and the lighting seemed to correct itself, so as far as i can tell it seems to be an issue with having shadow casting disabled. As a result this has left me completely stuck as I really need to be able to disable shadows on my foliage sprites!
zKrni.jpg

If anyone has run into this before I'd greatly appreciate any help you can offer!

Thanks,
Rob

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