Light source being blocked by invisible line?

sturtus

I've been using the annual expansion with ambient lighting effects and have run into a strange issue. There appears to be a line that is blocking all light in the middle of my map, but only when saved out as a jpeg. With effects turned on within CC3, the light passes through the space fine.

I should mention that there are no objects that fall along the line where the light is being blocked. I've attached the portion of the map with the issue, and will reply to the thread with a screengrab of the map in the editor.

sturtus

Here is the map rendered out.

sturtus

and here it is in cc3

Ralf

Hm, that's the first time I see this particular problem. Do you have shadow length in the Point Light Setup set to anything but 0?

jslayton

This problem is most likely caused by tiling in the output. Lights cannot illuminate anything outside the current screen (or tile in the case of printing / image saving). Anything that causes a render to be split into multiple parts will cause this sort of problem.

What is happening is that lights that go "offscreen" do not enter into the lighting solution. If you pan your map so that the bottom 3 lights go offscreen then the problem will appear as soon as they leave the edge (i seem to recall that there is a 10%ish border around the map to reduce the likelihood of this problem). In this case even though all of the lights are visible, CC3 is splitting your image into two parts to reduce the memory usage when rendering. Unfortunately, that means that the lights are "offscreen" in the top half of the render, but exactly where you want them in the bottom half. Your JPEG export looks as though it were output at higher resolution/quality, which causes the renderer to start tiling the image, which causes the artifacts.

I do not know how to resolve this issue.

sturtus

I haven't modified any of the effects in the template.

When the item renders, it has 9 tiles it writes (rendering pass 1/9, 2/9, etc). What I'll try is to move the lights up to just in front of those doors above the tile line. I should also mention that this map has about 25 lights and crashes if I don't reboot before a render.

I'll post my results.

sdavies2720

Put in a wall of darkness?

sturtus

wall of total annihilation?

i guess this actually brings up a good question.

Can only a portion of a map be designated as under the effects of lighting, with the rest of the map using "global light", or is it necessary to use lights to simulate sunlight, like I'm doing above? I know there is a "lighting limit" layer, but that just seems to block lighting effects.

By the way, this is my first thread in this forum, and I'm already impressed by the responsiveness. Thanks.

Simon Rogers

Have you downloaded and tried the latest version? I think the export might support larger images.

sturtus

I managed to resolve the issue by rotating the map and saving a slightly smaller jpeg. There is still a line where light is being blocked, but it is outside the encounter/dungeon area and insignificant enough to ignore.

I will see if I'm running the latest version, although I think I checked about 6 months ago.

Keeping my fingers crossed that CC4 will be released and have faster render times, advanced lighting controls, and support higher resolutions.

sturtus

Here is the result (if anybody is curious)