Lights only are bright after moving them

Hello!

I am having a weird issues where when I move my static point lights, they will glow very brightly against one of my meshes. However, when they’re actually built and I go into play, they are almost impossible to see. I am not having this issue with my other objects, only this one wall thing that I have. Any reason why this might be? Thanks!

Also interesting: changing the intensity does not change the intensity after building it.

The top image shows a point light that I just moved. The bottom one is a point light that has not been moved since building my lighting.

217450-lighting.png

Update: This is happening on a few meshes in my scene. I’m not sure why.

Bumping so I can get some help

I suspect this might be a lightmap resolution issue. Can you check the value of Light Map Resolution? It can be found by right-clicking the static mesh in the World Outliner and selecting Edit mesh, under Static Mesh Settings > Light Map Resolution.

For the mesh that is displayed in the opening post, the lightmap resolution is 64. What should it be set to? And is there a reason why it’s different for this mesh and not others?

I think that 64 is the default resolution. You can set this to a higher value that is a power of two and see how it changes. I recommend 256, 512 or 1024, depending on the size of the object and it’s importance in the scene.

It’s a massive wall that makes up a dome of a training arena. I turned up the lightmap resolution on the object to 1024, and it still gives me that same dim glow. Any other ideas? :confused: thanks!

As far as I know your options are:

  • Make the lightmap resolution really big (something like 8k or 16k). This could potentially be a memory hog and cause problems with texture streaming.

  • Divide the object into smaller segments, and make each segment with a decent lightmap resolution, or you can even have multiple lighting channels without dividing the object. This is probably the optimal solution for huge objects.

  • Make the lights dynamic or stationary but set them not to cast shadows. If your lights are similar to the ones shown on the picture there will be little visual difference except maybe the indirect bouncing which you can easily simulate by baking larger point lights even with smaller lightmap resolution. The gpu performance will suffer but not dramatically, even with many lights.

could you make a simple example of your problem and put it here ?
maybe its because you have have black object