Lighting and Baking

Lighting and Baking

Everything lighting lives under Tools ▸ Light.

Map lighting mode

Tools ▸ Light ▸ Map Lighting sets how the map is lit — Dynamic lights, Baked lightmaps (use existing) or Baked lightmaps (bake now) — and the viewport's lighting segment switches between Dynamic (live lights), Baked (lightmaps only) and Combined for comparison.

The Lighting window

Tools ▸ Light ▸ Lighting… controls the scene light in the viewport:

• Sun — direction, colour, intensity and sky contribution, matching the map's MapSunProperties. Save sun to map writes them into the map's own bin (a writer that did not exist before v0.4.0); Reset to map reads them back.
• Fog — the map's environment fog, a height fog drawn the way the game's shaders draw it: Fog enabled on this map, the fog colour and alternate colour, the start and end heights, and how strongly emissive surfaces show through it in normal and low quality. It is part of the sun, so Save sun to map writes it too. Most shipped maps switch it off.
• Screen fog (post effect) — a Height fog and a Depth fog laid over the finished frame, the way the game's post effect does, each with its own switch, colour, start, end and strength. Save screen fog to map writes it into the map's bin and reads it back before keeping it; Reset returns to the map's values. No shipped map uses it, so it starts off.
• The viewport's View ▸ Fog shows or hides both fogs. Direct3D 11 draws the screen fog with Riot's own shader; OpenGL draws a port of it.
• Lights — add, move (gizmo in the viewport), recolour, set radius and intensity. The list supports multi-selection, Delete selected, Remove all, and bulk adjustment of strength and height with Set all and Move all. Port lights into the map turns a legacy map's point lights into real dynamic placements. Show light position icons toggles the markers; Show ▸ Point-light range in the viewport draws how far each light reaches, with the global radius multiplier folded in.
• Lightmap — the baked lightmap's contribution, and Clean up lightmaps to return them to their pre-bake state.

Lighting settings are saved with the project per map: reload the project or rebake and your sun and point lights come back exactly as configured.

Baking

Tools ▸ Light ▸ Bake Lighting… bakes your dynamic lighting into the map:

• Lightmap layout — the bake uses the map's existing lightmap layout. Generate Lightmap Layout builds one for the meshes that have none, and an experimental option generates lightmap UVs for SRX_DynamicEffect meshes.
• Atlas and Quality — resolution, smooth normals for lighting, auto exposure.
• Output — compress as BC3 (Riot's format) and generate the full mip chain, so the result is a texture the client loads as its own.
• Lightgrid — bake the probe lightgrid (lightgrid.dat) as well. The lightgrid is what lights characters and props; the viewport samples it for placed props where they stand.
• Experimental shader lightmaps — enable lightmaps on shader families that do not carry them by default, including the legacy SRX_Blend_Master and SRX_Blend_Chemtech_Decal families ported Old SR atlases use.

Meshes whose materials cannot receive a lightmap are reported before the bake, so "why did this mesh not change" has an answer up front. Only shaders that support lightmaps get them enabled — enabling them blindly would break other materials.

Light.dat (legacy maps)

Old maps light their world through Light.dat instead. Load Light.dat…, Save Light.dat and Save Light.dat As… read and write that format directly — used together with the Legacy Maps workflow.