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Lighting

Relight Changed Lights

Relight Changed Lights runs Calculate Lighting on only the surfaces the lights you edited reach. Use it while you adjust lights. The rest of the level keeps its lightmaps.

Where to find it

  • Level, Relight Changed Lights (RF+)
  • RED+, Relight Changed Lights (RF+)

How to use it

  1. Edit one or more lights.
  2. Choose Relight Changed Lights (RF+).
  3. The first time in a session, a message asks whether to relight the surfaces lit by the changed lights and lists what a relight leaves out. Click OK. Later relights in the same session start at once. Cancel relights nothing, and the message comes back next time.
  4. The bake runs in the usual Computing Lighting window (see How RED+ bakes lighting), with the level's Lighting settings.

If no light has changed since the last bake, RED+ says "No lights have changed since the last bake." and does nothing.

What counts as a changed light

  • Moving or rotating it.
  • Changing Light Type, Initial Light State, its colour, Range, Intensity, Off Intensity, FOV, FOV Dropoff, Intensity at Max Range, Dropoff, the tube light Width, Dynamic, Shadow Casting or Is Enabled.

Changing only the Light Cookie (RED+) group does not count. If you are not sure whether a change counts, use Calculate Lighting.

What gets relit

  • Every surface a changed light reaches.
  • Every surface it reached at the last bake. Moving a light, reducing its Range or tube Width, clearing Is Enabled, ticking Dynamic, changing Light Type or setting its colour to black also relights the area it reached before the change.
  • Surfaces up to 3 m beyond those, so both sides of each join are relit.
  • If brushes were moved, added or deleted since the last bake, the relight covers the whole level. It still needs at least one changed light to run. The log then has a line containing [RF+ Relight] geometry has changed since the last bake.

Every other surface keeps its lightmap.

What a relight leaves out

  • Bounce and emissive light. A relight skips the bounce stage, so the surfaces it relights have no bounced light and no light from emissive faces or glowing liquids until the next full Calculate Lighting. The log has a line containing [RF+ Lightmap] scoped relight: bounce/emissive skipped.
  • Lightmap sizes and layout. A relight keeps the current lightmap pages. After changing Quality or Lightmap detail, use Level, Calculate Maps and Light.

The corrections described in Bake accuracy apply to the surfaces a relight relights, apart from bounce.

Good to know

  • The list of changed lights is empty when you open a level, and every bake clears it: a full Calculate Lighting, a relight, or a cancelled bake. After cancelling a bake, use Calculate Lighting.
  • Adding, pasting or deleting a light does not count as a change. Use Calculate Lighting after those edits.
  • Changes to the Sun, emissive faces, light cookies, ambient light or Level Properties are not tracked. Use Calculate Lighting.
  • The "RF+ Sun" lights that RED+ writes for the game never count as changed lights.
  • RED+ finds brush edits by comparing the brushes with the last bake in this RED+ session, even when that bake was of another level. Until a bake has run, a relight cannot tell that brushes changed. After editing brushes, use a full bake, not a relight. See How RED+ bakes lighting.
  • If a light in the level has a UID of 50000 or more, RED+ does not track light changes in that level. The log warns when the level opens or such a light is added. Relight Changed Lights then reports that no lights have changed.
  • A relight is timed like a full bake for the estimated bake time in Level Properties, so after one the estimate for that Quality shows the relight's shorter time.
  • A line containing light(s) marked changed since the last bake shows how many lights count. It is written at the start of every bake and when you click OK in Level Properties. After a relight, a line containing [RF+ Relight] scoped bake says how much was relit.