Rendering Problem with point lights

Lightcaster

Hi Community,

My recent maps were all made with "Wall Shadow, Point Lights" and i have some kind of rendering problem.

When i render the Picture with 1000x1000 pix it all looks fine


With 2000x2000 pix rendered the first strange thing occurs:
In the middle of the map some lightning Information is cut of.
This happens with every recent map i did always with this rendering resolution.
On other maps the second half of the pic isn't even rendered but just black.


With 3000x3000 pix the lightning Information is cut off at a different position ( strangely its more complete than the 2000x2000 pic ).


and with 4000x4000 there are 4 different lightning "cuts"


It seams to me the rendering passes are not always finishing.

I solved my problem with some kind of workaround by rendering the map in two sessions with the "rectangular section PNG" Export function ( 2000x1000).

I'm a bit puzzled with this behaviour and perhaps someone knows how to avoid this kind of problem.

jslayton

The problem arises when CC3 goes to render your image. Above a certain image size, it renders the final image in two or more pieces, or tiles. The point light effect has no way to cross the boundaries of the tiles, leading to the lights in other tiles being invisible in the current tile. As the image resolution goes up, the number of tiles increases, and the number of potential lighting discontinuities increases in lockstep.

You can see a related problem if you pan your map to one side to move lights offscreen. The offscreen lights will not appear in the visible portions of the image.

There isn't a way for CC3 to communicate the tile boundaries to the code that renders individual effects. As long as the effect is point-based (blur, color change, texturing, etc.), this behavior doesn't matter. For global effects like the point light effect, off-screenness is a big determiner of behavior (being on a different tile is effectively being offscreen). There isn't a way for the point lights effect code to obtain information about blocking objects that are offscreen, so it assumes that everything offscreen can't contribute to the lighting effect. I tried it the other way, but I felt that the results looked even more inconsistent than just making the tile edges as light blockers.

Henrie61

Mr Lightning :-)

Another good map.

Tallingroth

I'm also having this issue. Is this something that's being worked on for a fix?

jslayton

Posted By: TallingrothI'm also having this issue. Is this something that's being worked on for a fix?

The basic assumption for effects is that they won't need information not on the current local display. The light effects violate the basic effects assumption by assuming that all lighted areas are on the workspace provided to them (effects like blur, display, spatial matrix and so on also violate the assumption, but usually only by a few pixels and they make assumptions that are close enough to be normally not noticed). I think that fixing this problem would require a radical redesign of the whole rendering system, which is pretty unlikely.