SSE Light leaking, how to solve it?

[cumbrianlad]

I still think occlusion planes are the best way to go with this kind of layout if you need them. You may not need optimization at all.

 

Hjerim doesn't use any optimization but there's not a great deal in it for the game to render.

 

Hjerim's a good example of how Bethesda got around this sort of light problem... they just put lights into the second floor above the ones in the floor below so that the light leakage isn't noticed. You have to be a bit careful with that though, because too many lights hitting the same object can cause flickering in-game. A rough guide to if this will happen is to open the preferences window, go to the 'Shaders' tab and tick the '# of lights' box. This applies a filter to the render window in different colours, indicating how many lights hit each part. blue and green are no problem red is where you may have an issue... not always though. To be certain you need to test and wander around all rooms looking from different angles at everything. If you see some objects going suddenly dark then bright, it's a problem with too many light sources.

[Wolfstorm]

I was worried about the flickering, but I think its fine in this example.

However, it might happen again.

 

One idea would be to copy the base object and use it without the flickering. Although this is not realistic for a candle, it would make the leakage less noticeable.

[maxarturo]

"Occlusion Planes" must be used with care and they need a lot of testing to ensure that they will work correctly.

"Occlusion Planes" have one big disadvantage, when more than 2 are used in a single line of sight of the player FOV, they can cause a bug (which the name of it i can't recall) that will make some meshes to completly disapear from the cell, or to be more precise from the rendering process.

This bug is very strange in its behavior, it hasn't been documented what exactly triggers this bug.

- The amount of "Occlusion Planes".

- The distance of the "Occlusion Planes" from each other.

- The size of the "Occlusion Planes".

- The amount of vertex/triangles that the mesh has, it seems that the more a mesh is "Vertex Heavy" the more chances there are to be affected by the bug.

- Or a combination of all and some other parametrs too.

In some rare occasions the disappear mesh might never return to its original state even if you exit/enter that cell.

* I've personally encountered this issue.

"Occlusion Planes" works correctly and you have a better end result when used in combination with "Roombounds & Portals", although this combination have its own requirements to take care of, for example "Occlusion Planes" must never intersept a "Portal".

Edited March 12, 2020 by maxarturo

[cumbrianlad]

Didn't know that about occlusion planes bug. Im using them in my current player home because roombounds were out. I never have more than 2 in line of sight though... that's just luck! I'll bear that in mind.

 

Wolfstorm, I can't have explained properly what I meant by flickering.

 

It's not the type of light. It's a rendering issue that happens when too many light sources hit an object, regardless of what type of light. You'll know you've got it when yoy walk around in a cell and entire objects like walls suddenly go dark and then bright again as you move. It's because the game can't cope with the number of lights hitting it. Sometimes it renders it as if all lights are on it, sometimes none. You can sometimes pick it up in CK because one wall or floor piece is distinctly less bright than all the others around it.

 

I meant to mention before that if you're still having lighting problems, or adding extra lights to mask them causes the 'too many lights' problem, you may get away with reducing the light radii so that they don't overlap and using a brighter lighting template. If no vanilla brighter template exists for the colour of light you want, it's easy enough to duplicate the current one and tweak all the settings up, alter the fog distances etcetera. You can see the effect in CK as you work if your new template is applied to the cell.