I’m using engine version 4.6.1.
I have a very large area. The light build was taking forever so I lowered settings I was told that would help.
I build light with preview quality and I set static lighting level scale up to 4.
It took an hour to complete the light build and now has been stuck on “importing built static lighting” for a half hour.
I run windows 7 64 bit. i7 8 core. 3.2. 12 gigs of RAM. Gtx 770.
Dies anyone know what the problem could be???
There are also no shadows being casted.
I have a similar problem in 4.6 and 4.7. I have a large map with a lot of static meshes and ue4 crash in the “importing built static lighting” phase. Others small maps of the same project don’t have any problem with light building. any tips?
I’ve got 4300 actors on my map. I really need some info. I’m not getting many frame rate issues. What would someone do to fix this? It eventually just crashes. I can’t package this prototype u till lighting is built I guess.
The map honestly looks perfect expect for the “LIGHTING NEEDS BUILT” in the top corner…
This is an important issue it seems I’ve ran across a fee people not being to build lighting On A LARGE Level
I really need some help if possible. I’ve stated everything I can up top but I’m NOT sure what to even try to do at this point. This level is nearing completion and can’t be packaged until I fix this.
Does anyone know what could be causing these issues and how can attempt to fix them?
Lightbuilds are a very intensive process and for larger scenes that use static lighting are built using Build Farms that can handle this in less time. After the light build has finished it can take some time for all the textures to import and process correctly, even though the light build already reads 100%.
Things to consider when building static lighting:
More objects take more time to calculate.
Number of lights that are casting shadows increases light build calculations and time
Hardware specs play a big role. Even high-end machines can be hampered down by too many calculations and objects in your scene
Use a lightmass importance volume around playable areas. Using a large lightmass importance volume is not recommended as it negates the use of it.
Lightmap resolutions play a big role as well. Higher resolutions take more memory in your games and more time to process.
Foliage lightmap resolutions should be relatively low. Large values like 32 will significantly slow down light builds.
If lightmass runs out of memory it will have to write to the virtual cache on your HDD. This is a much slower process and will take significantly longer.
Often in larger open world type scenes you’ll find that the use of Dynamic lighting is chosen in place of static lighting. While there may be static lighting for some objects it’s not the entire scene. Some more popular open world games that use dynamic lighting are Skyrim, Fallout, and GTA.
The memory usage for lots of lightmap textures would have an impact as well.
The issues being reported with Lightmass crashing, taking too long, or stuck at 0% are that this method isn’t really used for larger worlds.
I would suggest using a combination of Cascaded shadow maps and Distance Field Soft Shadows like Epic did with its most recent GDC demo, Kite World.
I’ll look into this more. Maybe I should consolidate some models and bring down a few things…I will check all of these things and try again. Thank you!!
