Turns out the saga is set to continue regarding my bleeding shadow issue from a few weeks ago - I took the advice I was given and made wall sections that run the entire distance that I want and only have my meshes meet at corners etc, in order to reduce bleeds.
That helped - because now I don’t have bleeds running along straight walls, but when I get to corners, I am still having major issues.
This is what my corners look like (not intersecting, butted up against one another - incase this is relevant) :
At first I thought this might just be occlusion, so I decided to put a pillar in the corner to try and hide it a litte, but it only made things worse :
I have spacing etc between each UV shell and I have separated them according to direction changes. At this point I have no idea where to turn to on this issue.
All help greatly appreciated - if I can get this to a point where it is a matter of throwing meshes into the editor and aligning them to build stuff, I will make my meshes available to the community as a gesture of good will when they are completed.
Ambient occlusion in both lightmass(World details) and in postprocess turned off?
If it’s BSP then lower the lightmap resolution to 8 or something, if it’s static mesh try something like 512, also try changing lighting build quality to ‘production’.
I was unable to find a second location of ambient occlusion to turn it off.
I did change lightmap resolution to 512 though and saw absolutely no change at all. This is madly exhausting, if this is the trouble I am having with walls, what will it be like trying to lightmap props, or worse… a character? There has to be something I am missing, it just simply cannot be this hard, not for what is essentially a cube with some measurements changed…
I see this post has gone back and forth a few times trying to narrow this down. I’ll setup a simple example tomorrow when I’m back in the office and see if we can get your sorted on this one.
Can you confirm if you’re using a stationary or fully static directional light for your scene? I didn’t see it mentioned above.
Also, is this eventually supposed to be an interior scene or will it be an exterior scene with the directional light? Sometimes it’s best to try and start with lighting scenarios you’ll be targeting versus just using a directional light.
It really shouldn’t be this hard and there has to be a hiccup somewhere, but I’ll help you get to the bottom of it because we all know lightmaps can be a pain sometimes, even if they are useful once you get them sorted.
My light source is stationary and the context of the scene at present is that I am trying to get two wall sections to go together and have a corner. The eventual plan when all is fixed is to create a terrain in world machine and begin adding buildings to that, and they can be enetered freely. So while this is happening with the interior at the moment, this scene will eventually have both.
EDIT : I feel like we are also probably in different timezones, but if you like, I can upload the meshes I am using somewhere? I mean, this has to be something I am doing wrong - because it is a wall - its obviously something other people have gotten to work
If you wouldn’t mind sending the assets I can take a look. I just made a simple wall in Max and used just flat mapping with clean results, so not sure unless there some things that have been altered within the lightmass settings and level that may get these results from the get go. I typically don’t mess with the settings until I’m trying to correct some shadow seam errors for modular pieces or add a little more static GI to my scene.
Maybe one thing to try before sending the assets to rule out some things is create a new level or project with the default scene and build lighting. If the results the same, then at least we can narrow down if it’s the asset or lightmass settings that have been changed.
As for time zones I’m on Eastern Standard Time. If you see me on at all sorts of hours that’s not uncommon as I’m usually on the forums at home while I’m at my computer working on whatever it is I am doing.
Anytime a setting is changed from the default there is a small yellow arrow beside that value or property that you can click to revert back to the default settings.
For the lightmass ones in World Settings you can click Lightmass Settings yellow arrow to revert everything under that tab.
Hey - I uploaded the two basic meshes I have - essentially they are exactly the same, but one is longer that the other (as per your recommendation in the last thread, about making them meet at corners, and having entire wall sections be one mesh)
At the minute I am not overly concerned about how the texture doesn’t have great tiling - if I could get the lightmap to behave itself I would go ahead after that and sort out the textures.
I had a chance to quickly take a look at the assets before heading out early due to snow (FYI North Carolina doesn’t deal well with snow. :/). There’s nothing wrong with your assets at all. The UVs are fine and I set up a simple example but didn’t have time to grab the screenshots. I can post those tomorrow if I’m back in the office.
Having the meshes overlapping on the corners is what’s causing the dark line. When I initially tested I saw that your meshes lined up on a Grid spacing of 5 units. I placed their inner end corners together and built lighting. There is no overlap but the edges come together for the corner. If there is any overlap it will have the line. This is a shadow line and not AO.
I’ll post some screenshots when I get a chance. Just wanted to let you know that bit so you could test anything you wanted in the mean time.
Thanks for getting back to me… Okay cool, so that line is meant to be there and it is just shadow, that’s awesome - but what about the shadowing on the ground in that corner? There’s something about it that just isn’t right and it kills me to look at it.
Would the way to combat this be to build “corner sections” which would have the 90 degree angle in it maybe? Maybe that’s a bad idea as I don’t see it playing well with pillars…
If you remove the sides and the bottom faces you’ll not have this issues.
Here is my sample project I used with all sorts of setups. The meshes have been edited in 3Ds Max for various results. Hopefully this helps.
This is the final result. This is three meshes. A Corner Piece, and two walls. I just used the 16m wall since the 8m was setup the same way and would have produced the same results.
Since there is a direct light on the wall and no indirect lighting bounce here creating the seams that you would see otherwise everything looks good. If you go around to the backside of this mesh in the test project you can clearly see the seams. This is where using adjustments for the lightmass settings for Lighting Quality And smoothness will really help out. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll help. I didn’t change any of the settings here so everything is using default settings.
All the meshes are using their default lightmap resolution, as far as I remember, with exception of the floor which is using 512 on the two final result setups in the test project.
