Hey all, I've been having some problems with my lighting when I forge. I'm currently making a map near the waterfall cliff on Forge World. Various pathways and walkways are not gelling aesthetically; the whole benefit of forerunner architecture is that it is bland and blocky enough to blend well together, yet this is currently not the case. Blocks and ramps which are right next to each other are not at the same brightness (one section of walkway appears dark, the next appears light, and the next will appear as something in between, etc.). I just wanted to know whether anyone was having similar problems. I'm not sure if the current topography and geography is the issue (maybe building by the cliff is throwing things off). Is there some obvious error that I may have made, such as having modified the team colours of the blocks accidentally or something of that nature? There is always the chance that this is just some small bug, or something is glaring me in the face and obvious, but if anyone could maybe give a suggestion on how to fix it or report a similar problem I'd be grateful I'm struggling enough to make this map fair and competitive without having to worry about some basic aesthetics!
Normally this problem arises when objects get close to natural geometry, I cant say for sure in reach, but that was the case in Halo 3.
If the lighting engine is anything like the Unreal Engine, the lighting is baked into the geometry and dynamic objects are lit based on points evenly distributed around the level. If a point is in shadow when the lighting is generated, the point won't emit light on dynamic object. If there is sunlight hitting a point, it will. What you're probably seeing is the object going from one grid point to another that has different lighting information.
Cheers guys, did a bit of creative jogging about and I think it's fine now. I remember it was a problem in H3, but it seems for Reach that it has been reduced a lot. I found that on the whole I only really had a problem with some straight sections that didn't run *quite* parallel to the lighting parameters along the wall. I simply edged away from the cliff more. I'm not sure if this problem would come up even if you tried to base a map around the cliff, etc., I think it was noticeable mainly because I was connecting up lots of straight walkways next to each other. On a side note - when in an intense editing session near the waterfall, mute your TV before the water sound drives you crazy ^^