Hello there everyone,
I am trying to use Dynamic Lighting with the free Kite Demo/Open World Demo trees and foliage tool, but have been having a lighting problem. The leaves of all the trees are appearing gray and/or black. I have built my lighting many different times. Some of the things I have tested include: Changing the Light Source(Directional Light) to be static and/or stationary, changing the SkyLight to be static and stationary, and changing both the Light Source and SkyLight to be static and/or stationary. But this didn’t seem to make any difference. At the moment, both my SkyLight and Light Source are set to static.
However, if I place a tree using the foliage tool, and undo it, all of the trees return to normal and properly display their nice green leaves. This works until I change maps. If I change maps to any map and then change back to this map, they all return to having broken gray/black leaves. I have included a video example of this so you can see what I mean.
Video Example of the Undo Temporary ‘Fix’: https://youtu.be/wmGmPmsaBi4
I have already reduced the lightmap resolution for all of the trees from the very high 512-1024ish to a much more reasonable 128-256ish. But that hasn’t fixed my issue.
Current Foliage Instance Settings:
When I build my map, I get an error saying,
“InstancedFoliageActor_0 Large actor
receives a pre-shadow and will cause
an extreme performance hit unless
bCastDynamicShadow is set to false.”
Build Log (during building):
Build Log (after building):
Using Shader Complexity shows that the leaves on the trees (and grass) are extremely resource intensive:
So I can tell these are very shader intensive, but I am still unable to figure out why my leaves keep turning gray/black. I can temporarily fix them with the ‘fix’ listed above, but that doesn’t work when changing levels or packaging my project. So this is a bit of a problem.
Does anyone know how to fix this issue? I have been struggling to fix this for the last two days. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!