Hey guys, I'm having an issue with the Rift and lightmaps that I never had before. I'm using the most recent SDK.
I have everything lightmapped inside an interior I'm working on. And some emissive self-illum items that tie into this. Now, previously I had a couple instances of my lightmaps flickering to brighter, more contrasty versions of themselves if my head was in a very specific angle. Then today I got a more dramatic glimpse. I set some of my self-illum items to have much higher light emissions than they did previously. Re-baked. Entered scene. And now when this flicker happens, the lightmap briefly shows how light they SHOULD be, (i.e. blown-out whites from super-emissive objects). but only if the Rift camera is facing very specific angles, otherwise it snaps right back to a much more toned-down version.
This is a different issue than each eye displaying different contrasts. This seems to be the lightmaps displaying differently based on what exact position the OVR Camera Controller is facing.
I was able to replicate it while running on my main monitor and screencap it! Here's the difference. First image is how it looks walking around now, and the second image is what it randomly snaps to, and I believe what it snaps too it the more accurate one that I should be seeing, but don't see until the Rift is at one of these weird angles.
Now, if I turn off my main directional light, things appear overblown. So these are the lightmaps, flat, BEFORE other light & shadow affect them. It's almost like that main light is flickering out of existince based on where my head is aiming. It will be on, then half of one degree to the right, and it flickers off.
Is the light that is appearing/disappearing actually dynamic (not baked)?
My best guess is you have the number of pixel lights limited via Quality settings, so it will sometimes turn your lights into vertex lighting only (depending on where you are looking). If you are using forward rendering this could be the problem. If you are going to have a lot of dynamic lights, it might be better to run in deferred rendering, although doing just a few lights would probably be slower.
The light that is appearing/disappearing is set to Lightmapping: Auto; I'd like it to light my exterior, which is real time lit. Only the interior is baked. I have maybe 6-8 max real time lights that blink and change colors to make my exterior dynamic, but they don't light anything that's baked. I actually played with that Pixel Light setting earlier when it appeared some realtime lights in the distance (exterior) were popping on and off, so for both of my main quality settings, it's set to 20+, which I'd think is enough. It fixed those issues so that may not be it.
I am indeed using Forward rendering though. I'm actually a bit ignorant on the main differences, but just read a quick comparison...and you know what, right off the bat, changing to Deferred, the lightmaps snap to where they are in the "blown-out" screencap. So - they're accurate now! It barely had an affect on the "look" of the interior. It's almost as if my directional light pointing in now has a bit less of an effect on the baked interior, but it still looks great.
I'm going to try re-baking the thing now....about 20 minutes...then play around more and see if this problem is still occurring, but it appears as though by changing to Deferred, the root of the issue is gone!
So that was most likely my issue and I'm not sure why I didn't change that earlier. Thank you very much!
