So I’ve been testing my light maps today and I’ve come across an odd problem. Every time I build lighting it shows up after the build fine, but as soon as I either hit play or even move the camera the lighting just disappears.
Oddly enough it isn’t a baking issue as the lightmaps are clearly visible in the world settings. Plus if I change the lighting mode to lighting only it shows up fine, however on lit mode it is pitch black. This only happens with when lights are set to static, stationary works fine, as does moveable.
I’ve read a few other people might have had this problem but I didn’t see any exact solutions, could this be a bug?
What are your Meshes, Static or Movable? If they are set to movable then Static lights will not illuminate them at all.
On the other hand, the black edges you are seeing are while in Lighting mode are from light (or in this case shadow) leak across seams in your lightmap unwrap. There is some very good information about the importance of lightmaps and their alignment to the grid which can be found, here.
I understand the black edges that’s on my part with not unwrapping the second uv properly. Its when I bake the static lights I finished the build I go to play then everything turns black, however there are quite clearly lights baked and light maps showing in the world settings. I don’t quite know why this is happening. Is it something to do with static lights?
Have your tried to reproduce this in a new map? I’ve been trying to reproduce and have’t had any luck if you are willing, you can share the project and we will look into it directly. We would need the Content, Config Sub folders only and the *.uproject file. If you can upload them as a zip and share let me know and I will continue to dig into this issue for you
So I’ve even made a new project with a sample Map. If you load the map you should see that on lit mode it is pitch black, however if you look at detailed lighting and lighting mode you will see that there are indeed light maps there… and even on the world settings…
I’ve tested this on two computers and both have the same result. Not sure what is going on here, maybe I’ve missed a check box? not sure.
The problem with your build is the type of material that you are using and the World Setting’s environment color. Metallic Surfaces only reflect light, so with no sphere reflection capture actor in the level, you will not have anything for the light to bounce. Placing a Sphere reflection capture actor in the level and rebuild lighting all comes out as expected. You could also make the material itself non-metallic (0=Metallic) and the lighting will also build fine.
The World Settings under lightmass has an environment color option that in a brand new map is set to black. This is the color that is added to the reflection sphere capture when rendering the cubemap that gets added to all metallic surfaces and allows you to set a general tone to your level. In most of the starter content that uses the BP_Skysphere, the environment color is set to a light blue to help simulate the reflection of the color of the sky.
