I’m using the new Landscape Grass tool and it seems I can’t use static lighting with it. Unreal complains about LIGHTING NEEDS TO BE REBUILT and, even rebuilding everything, there’s an error message saying Maps need lighting rebuilt.
The image illustrates the difference between static lit ground and the static unlit grass.
It’s looking awful with these black shadows and there’re no options for static lighting on the LandscapeGrassType asset. Is this a bug?
As a temporary workaround, I’m using an emissive color on the grass that approximates it from the ground color when shadowed. But it’s not ideal. I need to, at least, get rid of the LIGHTING NEEDS TO BE REBUILT message onscreen, since this project is using Kinect4Unreal and, without the source code, I can’t package it. So I’ll be using Play In Editor at the client’s event.
In order for me to assist you I will need some additional information as well as some simple steps to get a test working on my end. Would you mind showing me the settings you are using for the major lights in your scene as well as the settings for the Landscape Grass you are using?
Are you using the foliage tool to apply the grass to your landscape, or are you using the new procedural foliage tool to randomly generate the grass within an area?
I’ve set up a test project reproducing the error [here][1].
Also, in case you have no time to look into it, the image below has the modified properties in my scene.
Thank you for the detailed pictures and for providing me with your test project. I believe I found the answer to your problem as well as the possible solution.
So I opened the output log after building the lighting, and discovered 4 lines of text that deal with static lighting and LOD’s.
As you can see, we currently do not yet support unique static lighting for each LOD. Another user had a similar issue with getting his grass and instanced static meshes to light properly. The workaround I gave him will work well in your case also.
Distance Field Lighting
This will make your scene dynamic, but the new lighting technique actually increases performance with large open world environments. It also helps with build iteration times since your lighting does not need to be baked with lightmass.
Let me know if you have any other questions or need further assistance.
Andrew, thanks a lot! The dynamic lighting is awesome! I’ve never used DFS because I thought it would hurt performance.
I only had to enable Dynamic Inset Shadow on my skeletal meshes (there are 2 in the scene) so they cast shadows in the world after turning on the Distance Field Shadows.
Could you make your comment an answer, so I can set as the correct one and close the report? =)
I only use Distance Field lighting now in my projects now. It just makes sense to do when making a large open world environments with a lot of foliage and dynamic lighting.
