Textures disappear after rebuild?

[Thrakkorzog]

I am a new UnrealEd user, and have just been experimenting with the program, creating very simple rooms.

I have a sporadic problem with textures disappearing following a rebuild.

Example 1 - I have carved a room, added lights, and rebuilt. No problem, 3d view looks good, level is playable with UT. For some textures, though, if I go into the properties-scale tab and sclae to eliminate repeating textures, then when I rebuild, the textures disappear, and the walls go black. This is true in the 3d view, and when playing the level in UT.

Example 2 - This has also happened to some textures I have used without scaling. Example, I added a box to my room, and textured each face with the same texture. When I rebuild, the texture disappears from some, but not all faces of the box.

Any help out there?

Thanks in advance.

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"It's 'Thrakkorzog'! With a 'K'!"

[Wanderer]

In the 3d view click on Mode=>Textures. I'm thinking it's just a lack of lighting.

[Jenkins]

Yeah, it sounds like lack of lighting.. add more lighting and see if it works.

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Jenkins

[Jenkins]

Also remember, if you are rebuilding and not going to go test the level, rebuild w/ Auto BSP off. That's what I do, its faster whenever I rebuild during my editing.

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Jenkins

[Thrakkorzog]

So you're syaing the scaling of textures may require more light? I'm anxious to get home and try this.

I know I had read in FAQs about ensuring you add lights - I knew I had done that, I just never thought to add MORE lights.

Thanks, I'll let you know how it turns out.

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"It's 'Thrakkorzog'! With a 'K'!"

[Thrakkorzog]

I'll try these suggestions regarding the lighting tonite. But as I said in the original post, I do have lights - but maybe not enough? It's not all the textures that disappear - when I rebuild, I lose the wall textures, but the floor and ceiling are still visible (3d view and in-game).

Here's another more detailed description of what happened. When I subtracted the cube, it was textured with what I had selected. I added lights. I could rebuild, and everything is fine. I changes the scale of the wall textures from 1 to 4. When I rebuild, the wall textures disappear. If I put texture scale back to 1 and rebuild, the textures reappear. ??

Thanks again!

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"It's 'Thrakkorzog'! With a 'K'!"

[Wanderer]

Ok, this is undocumented but it's true. The scale of the texture effects the quality of the lighting on it. So high scales have lower lighting quality while lower scales have sharper lighting quality.

While this isn't technically true it's the easiest way to put it. The lighting seems to be pixel based according to the texture. So larger pixels create larger lighting effects or something like that.

[Wanderer]

What I'm saying is that increasing the scale of a texture is almost like setting low shadow detail (if 2x scaled) or super-low shadow detail (if 4x scaled).

Generally though most surfaces that you'll scale up are very large and a big light will solve that problem. Should you need better lighting on that surface try using high shadow details or bright corners.

[Thrakkorzog]

Well, it doesn't matter how many lights I add - I lose the textures when I rebuild. Sure I can rebuild without 'BSP' but then my leveles lack dynamic lighting when I play them.

I'm experimenting with this very simply, with just a 512x512x512 cube. I've gone as far as adding 4 lights per wall, 4 lights on the ceiling. My room is REAL bright now. /~unreal/ubb/html/smile.gif But with the texture scaled to where I want it, they disappear (with Mode-Dynamic Lighting). And with Mode-Textures, they reappear.

I will experiment with different textures a bit. To see if this is repeatable regardless of the texture, or if it might be (who knows why) specific to this texture. It's from SkyCity.utx, by the way - a wood texture.

Some of the comments above Wanderer, you're referring to changes in light properties? I haven't experimented with those at all yet. I've simply clicked a wall and "add light her' so far.

Thanks again.

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"It's 'Thrakkorzog'! With a 'K'!"

[Wanderer]

What you need is brighter light bulbs my friend!

Remember that Rebuilding just the Geometry doesn't do a BSP or lighting. It just makes everything Unlit/fullbright.

What you need to do is to change the Light's Property=>LightColor=>Brightness=123 or 255.

If you want an easy way to figure out colors open up MS Paint and edit a color. Use the Hue, Saturation and Lumination (which is Brightness in UnrealEd) for the colors.