Lets make Lightmass EPIC (and understandable)

[CGMen]

Hi guys,
I'm trying a pretty easy and fresh new scene.
Dont' know what's wrong but I can't get sharp shadows, it just doesn't look right.

Light maps 64 - Render time 6 sec :


Light maps 1024 - Render time 16 min :


Here is the project:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6T...ew?usp=sharing

UE 4.11 Preview 4

Any ideas?
Stan

Hello. Sory for my english. I think you need just place in to the scene Direct Light and turning of some angle. He is emulated Sun light and you get sharp shadows.

[heartlessphil]

Stan, your ground mesh and floor mesh are one sided planes. In unreal, the backface of any polygon is culled so that means light will pass through it. Make sure your walls/floors/ceillings have some thickness. so basically in your scene there's nothing that block light from coming underneath. This is the view you get when you look under your house.



Other things :

-Your hdri is VERY bright, lower your skylight intensity or use the epic default hdri, it's probably more balanced.
-It's just better to use a static skylight instead of a stationary one.
-I don't think you need a portal in each window, 1 per room should be fine. They increase build time too.
-Increase the size of the portals a bit like this :



Good luck.

[Stan Brusse]

Hi,
Thanks for getting back to me.

I wonder if there isn't a issue with the 4.11 P4 as I can't even get shadow with a simple scene :

two boxes and a skylight :



I used the HDRI provided by the starer kit.

scene :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6T...ew?usp=sharing

Any ideas?

Thanks
Stan

[heartlessphil]

I'm on 4.11 ps4 and my scenes are working fine. I'll try to check it out later today.

That's really the most basic scene ever you have there hehe, you must have missed a setting or something.

[Stan Brusse]

yeah really weird,

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Stan

[heartlessphil]

It's because you have no materials on your brushes Stan!!! And even with a material, the resolution of the lightmap of a brush (vs static mesh) cannot be good enough for detailed shadows.

[VirtualLilies]

I've been reading this thread for the last couple hours and what's boggling my mind is whether we still should use modified *.ini values or not (while using 4.11).

And just to clarify, when I'm changing the values should I refer to a specific setting (medium/high etc) or should I change any global settings ? The only thing I've been playing with was (...)HemisphereScale set to 256 for a particular quality setting (in my case medium). I'd appreciate anyone enlightening me on this topic.

[MSL]

If you take good care while modelling, then you don't need to tweak ini values in 4.11. But, in very rare case for very large environments to remove few artifacts you may have to fiddle with ini values

With regard to changing values in ini, Yes, you need to change the corresponding settings i.e., if you are using Medium quality for light building, you need to change values under Medium settings in ini

[Tryedz]

ue4arch is down D: just when I was going to try out those ini settings.

edit: it's back now

[jldevoy]

I get safety warnings no matter what browser i try to access the ue4arch forum from.

[heartlessphil]

I tried to bake a 4600 objects scene. Quite an adventure lol!

[Tryedz]

Hi, I've been doing some tests with 4.11, and unfortunately I'm getting some weird stuff in my results, I wouldn't say they're light leaks so far, but they're anomalies in the lighting nertheless.



As you can see, the shadows suddenly 'choke' in some spots near the edges.

I'm using the medium preset.
These are my lightmass settings:

And the .ini changes are only these:
NumHemisphereSamples=64
IndirectPhotonDensity=2000
IndirectIrradiancePhotonDensity=1000
IndirectPhotonSearchDistance=180
RecordRadiusScale = 0.12


Besides the artificial lights that were already in the scene, the only change I made was swapping the skylight with a directional light that shines diagonally down into the opening.
Also, adding a portal to the opening where light shines in from changed nothing, apart from making the baking time 3x longer :0

Also, the contact shadows are kinda... weird? At every corner they are there, looking like outlines, making the scene look cartoonish, it definitely doesnt look like something I would get from a vray render, for instance. Is there a way to fix this?

[ZacD]

It's probably the AO from the post process volume, turn it off.

[Tryedz]

No luck with that :/
How about the other issue? I can overlook the last one, but that one might be a real problem in the future

[RI3DVIZ]

Do your walls have thickness like 6" thick with polys on both sides and do they overlap the ceiling (also with thickness)?