Bad quality pixelated Lightmaps

[anonymous_user_c0bf83c0]

Hello All,

since few days I am struggling with a very bad pixelated quality of light bakes on the walls of an interior project I am currently working on. It is an ArchViz project of a museum so the goal is to get the best possible quality of white surfaces. Unfortunately I cannot find out why I get this very poor quality on the walls and ceilings whereas the floor looks quite good and smooth even though they have exactly the same lightmap settings. They have different materials though but very basic ones (Diffuse + Roughness + Normal). The screenshots show the Lighting Only view mode. I hope you guys could give me some hints how to deal with it.

Lighting settings:

• Static direct light source with a static Skylight + default UE4 SLS Cubemap, res=128)
• Lighmass importance Volume over the whole lvl set default
• Light Portals in the windows
• Box reflection capture over the whole level + few Reflection Capture Spheres with radius of around 7m overlaping a bit
• Bake quality “medium”, world lightmass settings - see screenshots.

Project Settings:

• reflection capture resolution = 1024
• reduce lightmap mixing on smooth srfs = on
• no texture streaming
• the rest set default

Meshes were modeled and UV unwrapped manually in 3dsMax.
Source lightmap index for each Mesh set accordingly to its separate channel.
All meshes lightmaps overriden to 1024px.
UV islands of lightmaps are straight and snapped to 1024 grid.

I am run out of ideas what could have gone wrong.
Hope to see some answers soon…

[anonymous_user_c0bf83c0]

@ZacD

Turn off lightmap compression if you haven’t already.

I baked the lightmaps with no compression - this was the solution. Thanks a lot ZacD.

@S-Dot

Glad you could solve your problem.
I am using the box capture a lot. But having one over the whole level is not recommended in any unreal docs as far as I know. And when it comes to Evermotion: No offence but they have a bit of a brute force approach to get better quality. This can be problematic in real time scenes. You will notice this if you ever opened one of their scenes.

Thanks for your reply. That is true - working with box reflection is much more demanding and less predictable as with spheres. The project I am working on is a perfect rectangle in this case - so I guess it is quite obvious why I used it.
I also agree what you say about Evermotion - however the level of details and the overall light quality they are able to get is quite a high standard in ArchViz. If one doesn’t need to care about the optimization much and seek for best possible quality then this approach is quite evident to me.

@S-Dot

The most important thing to get a good result with lightmass is how you lay out your lightmaps. That’s where I try to improve it first.

You are right. This was however not the issue here as I had a full control over them from the very beginning (made manually).