I’m having a weird problem with my landscape. For some reason each component is lighting up differently like a checkerboard. Under direct lighting it looks fine. I’ve tried 8 and 16 static lighting resolution, and have messed with all different kinds of shadow settings, but nothing has fixed it. Does anyone know what I’m doing wrong?
Those look like the seams between objects that Lightmass causes when it calculates indirect lighting (GI), because it processes objects separately to allow parallelizing (multiple threads and multiple machines). Unfortunately we don’t have a solid fix for this yet and the issue has existed since UE3. There are some things you can do to make it better though:
- Build on production
- Make your terrain components larger, this reduces the frequency of the seams
- There have recently been a lot of quality improvements to the lightmass GI solver, and a new property called IndirectLightingQuality which allows ramping up the GI quality. These can reduce the seams. Unfortunately these have not made it into a rocket build yet.
I experienced this issue, after rebuilding lighting and going in-game through PIE or independent game loading the issue goes away 
I still see it come back whenever edit the landscape, but again, it does not show up for me in PIE or in-game
Rama
Odd, it’s appearing for me when I’m in PIE or the game as well. It does look worse before rebuilding. I tried creating a whole new map with just cubes and a terrain with ambient light and still got it.
The only kind of crappy work around it I’ve found is making the components larger. The lines are still there but less noticeable and further apart.
Hi Corey,
I am having some difficulty reproducing this issue on my machine. If you could, can you please provide the level for me on the FTP? That would allow me to get a much better understanding of what is happening and then I can also give it to our landscape specialist if need be.
Thank you,
Alexander
Hi Alexander,
I uploaded it in the CoreySine folder on the FTP. It’s more noticeable in ‘Light Only’ mode with the default material.
Let me know if you need more info.
Corey
Hi Corey,
Thank you for your level. When I added it into my test project on our internal build, I was able to see the blocked shadows that you are describing, however after building and keeping the lighting, the shadows became normal. Unfortunately, I am unable to reproduce the error after building and keeping the lighting in Rocket Beta 4 as well. Please let me know if there is anything that I am doing different than your reproduction steps.
Thank you,
Alexander
Hmm… It must be my lighting build settings? I’ve never messed with them other than changing the lighting quality. I’ve only built my lighting using the ‘Build all levels’ in the top toolbar. I haven’t messed with config files at all either. I’ve only acquired Rocket recently, so I haven’t had time to go too in depth with all that yet.
Although an odd thing happened once where I had both Rocket and UDK open. I built the lighting in UDK, which opened swarm. Once it was done, I then built my lighting in Rocket, and it attempted to build the lighting with the old swarm from UDK. It opened up the swarm window and sat there at 0% for 5 mins or so. After I closed UDK and swarm, Rocket was able to build lighting normally. I don’t know if that could of affected things or not. I should mention this occurred in a different project.
Only thing I can think of is uninstalling and reinstalling Rocket. I’ll give that a whirl and see if it clears up this issue.
Starting a new project and uninstalling/reinstalling Rocket hasn’t solved the issue.
Can you please tell me your computer diagnostics? What graphics card and driver are you using? I may have to put together a test machine to get a reproduction of this issue.