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Lightmap Errors

On occasion, the lighting compiler will do some funky math and make the lightmaps too small for the face they are being applied to. The effect is a rather ugly "zebra stripe" effect on surfaces as the lightmap repeats itself many times over the face of the object.

There are a few ways to fix this so that you don't have to rebuild the map.

Zoneinfo

  1. put a ZoneInfo in the area in question
  2. increase the zone ambient lighting
  3. Rebuild the geometry and lighting
  4. If you didn't want ambient lighting there, you can always
    • remove the ZoneInfo
    • set its Zone lighting to zero

Manually move geomtry

  1. vertex edit the points of the surface to one position
    • Re-aligns the texture and clears the lighting.
    • Doesn't work as often
    • tends to be hard to implement in large or complex areas.

Avoid the problem

  • wait on lighting an area until you are nearly done with the architecture
  • if you want to see the lighting before you finish
    1. save a copy of the map to some other name
    2. apply lighting.

Reduce your test lighting time by adding the lights to a single group in the group browser

Related Topics

Comments

Bean: I just save, close UnrealED, restart my computer. That fixes the problem.

Cursed_Soul I only get this problem when Im rebuilding when d3d in the 3d view window is activated, if you change it to software rendering, and rebuild lighting its gone, that does the trick for me.


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