Lighting settings in Level Properties

The Lighting group in Level Properties sets how RED+ bakes the level: texel density and shadow quality, bounced light, ambient occlusion, terrain smoothing, face-edge repair and the lightmap detail limit. Its last line estimates how long a bake takes. For the bake itself, see How RED+ bakes lighting.

Where to find it

Open Edit›, Level Properties.... The Lighting group is at the bottom of the dialog.

• Changes apply when you click OK, and every bake reads them again when it starts.
• Quality, Bounce %, ambient occlusion, terrain smoothing and Repair face-edge shadows are saved in the level. Lightmap detail is saved in redplus.ini and applies to every level.

Quality

Sets the texel density and the ray counts of the bake. The default is Good - 4 tex/unit, bounce on.

• Texels per unit decides how sharp lighting can be. Doubling it gives up to four times as many texels. More texels take longer to bake and make a larger file.
• Shadow rays are traced from each texel towards each light. More rays give smoother shadow edges.
• AO rays are the rays per texel for ambient occlusion.
• Ultra and Extreme use the same shadow rays, AO rays and bounce as High. They only add texels. A single face too large for the Lightmap detail limit stays at that limit.
• Draft uses the fewest rays and no bounce.

Texel density takes effect when lightmaps are laid out. After changing Quality, use Level›, Calculate Maps and Light. Calculate Lighting applies the new ray counts and bounce but keeps each lightmap's current size.

Bounce %

How much light bounces off lit surfaces onto others, in percent.

• The default is 50. Enter 0 to 100; a higher number counts as 100.
• 0 turns bounce off. Emissive faces still light the level.
• The box is greyed out with Draft, which never bakes bounce.
• Raise it to brighten areas that only get reflected light.
• If the box does not hold a number when you click OK, RED+ keeps the previous value and notes it in the log.

Ambient occlusion (soft contact shadows)

Darkens ambient light in corners, creases and where surfaces meet, from geometry within 3 m.

• On by default.
• It changes only ambient light, never light from lights or the Sun, so it has no visible effect where the ambient light is black.
• Quality sets the rays per texel: 6, 16 or 32.
• Turn it off to tell which dark areas come from ambient occlusion and which are real shadows.

Smooth lighting across faces (terrain)

Lights neighbouring faces as one smooth surface where the bend between them is less than the angle in the box, so terrain built from many small faces does not step at every edge. Bends sharper than the angle stay hard.

• Off by default. The angle defaults to 45 degrees and accepts 1 to 89; other values are clamped.
• It applies to faces that have no smoothing group. Faces in a smoothing group (Smoothing Groups in Face Properties) keep their own angle limit.
• If the angle box is empty when you click OK, RED+ keeps the previous angle. If it holds something other than a number, RED+ keeps the previous angle and notes it in the log.

Repair face-edge shadows

• Off by default.
• When ticked, the outermost row of texels inside each face takes its values from the rows just inside it, which removes dark lines along face edges.
• It takes effect at the next Calculate Lighting.

A level saved by RED+ builds 18 to 21 after clicking OK in Level Properties has the repair turned off. If you want it, tick it, click OK, use Calculate Lighting and save the level.

Lightmap detail

Sets the largest lightmap one surface may have and the size of the lightmap pages. The choices are Standard - stock size, 2x - wastes half of each page, 4x - recommended (the default), 8x - wastes half of each page and Maximum - sharpest, largest files.

• It is saved in redplus.ini, so it applies to every level, not only this one.
• It takes effect after you restart RED+, as (applies after restart) beside the list says. An existing level only changes after Calculate Maps and Light. See Lightmap detail and file size.

Estimated bake time

The last line of the group estimates how long a bake of the open level takes at the selected Quality, and changes as you pick another one. It is there as soon as a level with lightmaps is open.

• RED+ counts the level's texels at that Quality from its current lightmaps, with the Lightmap detail in use.
• It times them with your own bakes. Every finished bake is recorded in redplus.ini: the Quality, the level's size, its texel count, the time and the RED+ build. The 24 most recent bakes are kept.
• A level is recognised by its geometry (its face count and overall size), not by its file name, so a renamed or slightly edited level still matches.
• A worked-out time never shows a higher Quality as quicker than a lower one.

The text after the time says what the estimate is based on:

• Until RED+ has timed a bake, the line shows only the texel count and asks for one bake. A level with no lightmaps shows "bake once to measure this level".
• A cancelled bake is not recorded. A relight is recorded like a full bake, so after one the estimate for that Quality is the relight's shorter time until the next full bake.
• After a level opens and after each bake, the log has a line containing [RF+ Bake] estimates with the estimate for every Quality. In it, High is called Maximum.

Levels lit by the Sun

For a level lit by the Sun, tick Override static mesh ambient light scale in the Advanced Options group above and set New scale value to 1. Otherwise the game multiplies a placed mesh's light, ambient included, by 2 in single player and 3.2 in multiplayer, and sunlit meshes come out brighter than the ground under them. While the override is not ticked, saving a level with a Sun writes a warning to the log.

Good to know

• A line containing [RF+ Lightmap] settings applied: in the log shows the settings in use. It is written at the start of each bake and when you click OK.
• RED+ keeps these settings in its own section of the level file, which other programs skip.