Hello peeps,
I’m having some dificulties with light baking onto cornices (the bit where the walls hit the ceiling).
Often these are left off of modern renderings but I need them for a project I am working on. The issues is clear in the attached screens and I would really appreciate any feedback and/or help on this matter. Thanks in advance.
This is the result after lighting bake, and this is with a light Map Res of 4096!
Is this to do with too small fields on the uvmap?
It is definitely a UV issue. Your static mesh details say you are using your third UV channel for lightmaps, so show us what that looks like.
For best results, you will need to edit these UVs with a lot of care. Your first screenshot looks like a basic automatic map, which is not optimal for lightmaps. You should cut and sew the appropriate edges so that the shadows bleed in a natural manner, like smoothly down the face and not around corners. You should rearrange your UV islands (shells, charts) so that they fit better inside the UV space to make use of every available pixel. Your current UVs (in the first picture) are very wasteful (which is okay for tiling diffuse textures), so I hope your lightmap ones are different. Finally, try to snap every edge to a grid in your UV editor that represents the pixels in a lightmap. This will ensure that no shadows bleed into places where they are not meant to be. Read this article for more info on lightmaps. Number 13 talks about that pixel grid.