Lets make Lightmass EPIC (and understandable)

[serriffe]

Hi

Some general question here, maybe is not directly related to lightmass at the moment but you guys seem like you could help anyways. (Sorry if my question ended up way far frome the subject, in that case, pointing some references would be nice)

For a VR application (PC) im doing some Arch Viz interior scene, that means we would like to make all the lights static, but when making the light maps im losing the hard shadows form the directional light which is suppose to be the sun that enters frome the main and big window to the living room of the scene.

I know i'm suppose to share some screenshots and stuff, but at this moment i don't have permission to do so from my employer, so im trying at least to have some general suggestions while i get that permission.

The setup is a directiona light and a skylight with a custom HDRI. I do know that for static lights we have a previz before lights are built, so we have very harsh shadows from that previz before baking. What happens is: i would like to keep those hard shadows on this scenes, or at least to have less soft shadows than im getting from the bake (which i know is a weird request hahahaha).

Any suggestion would help, any. Im open to experiment because my art director is requesting those shadows and for now, that's the biggest problem i have with this scene.

Thanks.

My first guess would be that your mesh lightmap sizes are too small? or your UV distribution is large or your mesh itself is too large as well. It helps when you breakdown your mesh into smaller pieces so you can get more details on your lightmaps. Try to bump up lightmap size a bit more to 1024 - 2048 just to testing purposes

[lobachevscki]

[QUOTE=serriffe;664751]My first guess would be that your mesh lightmap sizes are too small? or your UV distribution is large or your mesh itself is too large as well. It helps when you breakdown your mesh into smaller pieces so you can get more details on your lightmaps. Try to bump up lightmap size a bit more to 1024 - 2048 just to testing purposes[/QUOTE

It's a room similar in size to the one in post #296 on this thread, what im getting right now is actually similar to that result but i need some hard shadows.

I think my UV are good enough and my lightmap is a 1024 at this moment (taking into account only the floor which is the most noticeable part anyway). I will try then to split the floor and see what happens.

Thanks.

If anyone has any other suggestion i will take it into consideration aswell.

[lobachevscki]

Hi

rafareis123 reccommends in his tutorial not to use bounce cards or 'ghost spotlights' as i call them (for example, fake light sources outside windows) in the scenes because is not physically accurate, and i can understand why that is, but i would like to hear your thoughts on that matter because there is no guidance to be found about their use.

That recommendation is an absolute no for you guys? If not, In which situations and where in your scene you should use a bounce card (or several) or spothlights?

I know that's a very open ended question, but i think we can find some summarization here based on everyones experience. At the very end i know is a matter of study photography for interiors like any respectable photographer and apply that knowledge to UE, but for now let's try to keep simple.

Thanks

[duke22]

Does anyone know what this guff in the edges is?

[lobachevscki]

Does anyone know what this guff in the edges is?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]130500[/ATTACH]

Those artifacts tend to dissapear when you crank up your world settings. Try for example toning down your world Scale Setting.

[lobachevscki]

Looking for general advices in this scene.

No Post process.

One Skylight (with HDRI) and Directional light, a number of interior lights.

For this bake i just used the Medium Quality and toned down my World Scale to .2, bounces to 15 and Quality to 10.

We feel the light is not quite balanced yet, and there is a noticeable contrast, but cranking up the settings on the lights washes out everything.

Any advice?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57b1CiL0A9k

Thanks.

[Norman3D]

Lightmass needs this feature!! It's something similar to what was used in The Last of Us to fix seams

https://github.com/ands/seamoptimizer

[AndrewM47]

Lightmass needs this feature!! It's something similar to what was used in The Last of Us to fix seams

https://github.com/ands/seamoptimizer

Wow, i just read "lighting techniques of the last of us" and that seam optimizer technology is something epic should consider implementing. +1

[ZhenyaChistovsky]

Lightmass needs this feature!! It's something similar to what was used in The Last of Us to fix seams

https://github.com/ands/seamoptimizer

I have never seen this problem in the UE4

[Luoshuang]

Lightmass needs this feature!! It's something similar to what was used in The Last of Us to fix seams

https://github.com/ands/seamoptimizer

In addition to that, the author has another interesting thing, https://github.com/ands/lightmapper, which is a GPU-accelerated lightmap baker.

[emreonder]

More realistic shadows

Hello,

I red the whole post and try to do things said in this post. However, meshes look like flying still. How can i get shadows more realistic with below settings? I'm using just skylight with ambient occlusion settings in world settings

[Bigodon]

anything above 2 on Indirect Lighting Quality
is giving me some crazy irreal baking time, ok... the scene is not that simple

this is a big interior, full of props, with many rooms with windows and artificial lights, there are 7 light portals only on window
i'm going to try a slight increased value to 4 or 5 and see if thing still getting ugly on baking time, with:

Static Lighting Level Scale = 0.15
Num Indirect Lighting Bounces = 100
Indirect Lighting Quality = 2
Indirect Lighting Smoothness = 1.0

i was getting like 13 to 15h for bake the light on production
tried the indirect on 10 and takes a whole day for 0.5 percent on swarm, lol (32gb of ram @2800mhz and i7 5820k @4ghz)

the ini edit wasn't anything to scary about, i used the [MENTION=9000]TAXI[/MENTION] experiment, and before that i only changed the NumHemisphereSamplesScale = 64

[ZacD]

i was getting like 13 to 15h for bake the light on production
tried the indirect on 10 and takes a whole day for 0.5 percent on swarm, lol (32gb of ram @2800mhz and i7 5820k @4ghz)

Are the light map resolutions on all the assets reasonable?

[Bigodon]

Are the light map resolutions on all the assets reasonable?

from 64 to 1024
2048 for floors, walls, roof

[tc22]

nice setting!