So I did many try and errors in getting my head around light baking (read a few threads and tutorials too).
Main issue for now are blocky shadows. How can I make the shadows look less pixalated without going overboard with the lightmap density?
I prepared the cubes in Blender. They are placeholders for the props in a FPS game. So they are more or less 1x1x1m with LightMap Res set to 128 (256 gets red color).
Are there any other settings than LightMap Res that would sharpen the shadows borders? Or maybe better way of LightMap packing in Blender?
the lightmap density debug view shows you literally the lightmap pixels/texels. if you need more resolution in select areas or on some props you’d have to increase it even further. it comes with texture memory costs for polygons that are in full shadows or light, and don’t require that much detail.
to handle the lightmap resolution assignment even more efficently you’d have to generate the lightmap uvs inside of blender. this way you can effectively tweak the lightmap resolution on a per polygon level. for example the cube with the blue arrow would have like 2 large lightmap polygons for the detailed shadow edges and the rest pretty much smaller lightmaps, to just account for basic gi distribution.
you could get even more advanced and generate specific geometry like loop or knife cuts just for areas where the shadow edges would appear and you need fine grain lightmap resolution. this workflow gotta be excuted entirely in blender tho. you would have to basicly setup your scene lighting in blender and bake an approximate look in there to know, where you’d have to cut geometry for the detail lightmaps.
that would look something like this. the teal polygons being low res. the smooth blending of low and high detail lightmaps is not guaranteed tho. this is extremely efficient lightmap compression, but really hard to manage. (note: source engine used to have a cli switch to compress low detail lightmaps into smaller tiles. unfortunately this is not an unreal engine feature, afaik.)
