…plus textures, UV vertices, maps, material etc. I thought the point was to save memory and use instanced meshes.
You don’t have to use unique textures with unique meshes. You can still use tiling textures as long as you UV map them correctly. Same goes for materials. Cost of UV vertices is negligible.
Of course you could do it but what’s the point of having 3 unique assets when you can repeat one and have the same effect? Also, the topic here is how to tell lightmass to treat 2 planar walls as one unique surface.
And my point is instead of using two planar walls, use one wall. One big wall vs multiple small ones is better anyway for performance, you’re rendering less polygons and doing less draw calls (assuming a simple cube like wall).
I understand perfectly but that’s not the solution if you want to follow a workflow like this Modular environments. Do you have a solution for this specific problem?
I’d just make larger modular pieces in that case. Instead of a 1 meter wall segment, make a 2, 4, 8 and so on segments and use the largest one you can. For seams I’d make trim meshes. That’s the only working solution currently, unless you want crazy long lightmass builds :\
Most of those modular environments have elements that hide seams. Pillars, beams, lines on the textures that match up with seams, etc.
Even in simple scenes, just make it look like was built that way.
I still hope that someone from the developer team will take a look into this matter. Since the import/export trick is working I don’t see why they cannot make it work in engine. Grouping or parenting could be a fitting solution.
Would be awesome if Epic could implement something like this.
This video summarize some of the basics to get clean LM, if you still have problems export the meshes you want to join, clean the LM in an editor of your choice and reimport.
I just read this comment, 2018 still waiting or even at least a fix for the lightmapper that still broken in 4.18 with the new lightmap system. Good to see you’re waiting for better hardware when the PS3 games had realtime GI aswell PS4, still no solution here at proper FPS.
Seems then like still no solution for this problem other than don’t use modular parts.
The lightmapping system is definitely something they should fix, at the very least they could just give us the option to set groups of objects that should be processed together.
As for GI, there is no fully dynamic GI system, every system right now is specifically optimized for the game that uses it and isn’t something that works in all the situations that people need. The biggest problem is that Epic still has to support the Xbox One. If they moved to a new generation then they’d probably be able to implement a dynamic GI system that works on most gaming PC’s and the new generation of consoles.
The only reason Epic hasn’t allowed the users to group meshes to be light built on the same thread is because it’s not too useful in games, and this is only place Epic makes money. ArchViz? Epic is just using it for free publicity for UE4.
No, I’m pretty sure that everyone would benefit from that, there’s nothing unique about how archviz would need that feature that isn’t applicable to games in general. I think they’d rather have some kind of automatic fix and simply haven’t tried to do anything to solve the problem or make a workaround for it.
*Right-click “Creating single static mesh from selected actors” and replacing the single ones could be a workaround *(it happened again)
“Force Volumetric Lightmap” in the object settings might help
Nov 2024 and the lightmapping issue with seams is still a thing for me… crazy but the merging actors thing is still valid 10 years after.