I have created a collection of modular building meshes and the lighting does not seem to transition from one to the other without seeing the seam. Each modular piece is a plane 250x250 units and is modified to have doors, windows, or nothing. I use one mesh for the inside wall and another as the outside wall. This keeps each mesh the same exact size when I uv unwrap them and it allows me to use a regular seamless material across many without seeing a seam. In the picture I am using the M_Basic_Wall material from the Starter Content as I mock up the buildings for the inside walls.
I have tried changing lightmap settings and adding a reflective capture but no luck.
The corner with the light (For testing purposes only) looks great
Would anyone be able to assist me on a solution to the issue?
The issue is the lighting system, it processes each object by itself, so things like the smoothing can make the lighting look different between meshes. It becomes most apparent on areas that receive a lot of indirect lighting.
In your situation you shouldn’t be using modular meshes, those parts are so low detail that the benefit of a modular workflow is lost and you’re actually making it run worse than it could because each object will count as a draw call. Modular workflow is so that you can try to save memory, but those meshes are so low poly that it doesn’t save all that much and you’re taking a bigger hit in the draw calls.
Thanks, I was trying to save myself time but I realized I can just model the buildings and save the headache. Everyone keeps saying to make modular buildings though I found they look better if I model them… Less “Blocky”.
I am keeping what I have in case I want to add a small room but other than that I will take my other approach.
You’ll save a huge amount of time in the long run by working with modules like you are now, once you’ve built up a decent number and you want to push them to a good level of detail you’ll find you’re only having to iterate on a few separate pieces in your 3d package and let them auto re-import. If you were to build the whole building every time, iteration will become extremely slow when you need to manually duplicate all these pieces out and then bring a large expensive prop into UE4. I hope this helps.
Maybe there are some tricks to break the seams up, foliage or detailing on the modules for example, in a perfect world there’d obviously just not be seams.
If you have other details to add, then that can change things—many games that use modular assets will have details that hide the seams. But if you aren’t planning on doing changes like that, and it’s going to be blocky then you’re going to get bad results.
It’s hard to say if modular assets are easier, at the very least it’s already in the engine and you don’t have to mess with exporting a lot of stuff. But what you could also do is model things modularly in your 3D program and then attach the meshes together once you’re finished, that way you can iterate faster and then ultimately avoid having the high draw calls.
Well with openings to the outside world I think the root of the problem is your trying to force a directional light only to fill a volume of space. Place a skylight in as well and the result should blend as a final gather. More or less this should create the same result that you forced with a point light.
