Lightmaps on displacements...

[o_a boojum snark]

This is the most active forum I visit with a decent amount of mappers so I'm asking here... (other people seem to do so too, so whatever)

Some of my displacements are having their lightmap majorly distorted (32x32 lightmap looks like about 96x8 ), and I can't figure out how to fix it, nor what is causing certain ones to do it. The ones that are doing it are not all the same distortion amount either.
It's getting rather annoying and ends up making shadows on the surface look like crap.

Anyone have ideas on what to do?

[trepid_jesse]

We've found out that a lightmap scale of 4 is fuckin' magical for displacements, but you also need to break up displacements.

So, if you have some displacement with lighting problems, lower the lightmap scale and the clip the displacement in half.

Other times it helps to place low intensity light entities around the shit to smooth out the lighting across that displacement and other displacements/brushes.

But lots of times you have to add a lot of lights because it won't always smooth the lighting across adjacent displacements.

Fixing the lighting on displacements can be a big fuckin' dickhole to widen so you can have more kids, but lowering the lightmap scale, clipping them in half, and putting lights around the shitty ones can help.

The -maxdispsamplesize RAD flag shit doesn't help much, at least, not with some of the problems we ran into, but it might help with some other shit, shit?

[o_a boojum snark]

Ah thanks. Now I'll remember to keep my displacements fairly even in length:width.

[trepid_jesse]

I don't think that matters too much, though.

I mean it might, but we've used long/thin displacements that are lit fine.

So, shit like 256 long / 4 high, and it's still lit fine. So, I dunno how much of an impact the ratio of the dimensions has on the lighting.

[o_fonfa]

displacement lighting is fucked up

[o_imbrifer]

When having sex, always put your balls in, too.

I've never had displacement lighting problems, probably because I'm so badass.

[o_mj]

you da man

[trepid_jon]

It basically comes down to the size of the triangles on a displacement when you're trying to make its lightmap scale better/lower/right.

The distance between each vertex...if the gap is too big, sometimes the lightmap scale can't be as small as you want it to be.

And yeah, like Jesse said...4 is a magical lightmap scale for displacements. It's weird how 8, 16, and up aren't very different...and then 4 is pretty much perfect.

Anyways, if you ever want to make a displacement's lightmap scale lower but it won't get any lower (you set it to 4, reselect the face, and it's actually not 4), you might have to split the displacement up to make the triangles smaller so the lightmap scale can be lower.