We encountered a strange problem when building the lighting with static lights.
In one of our projects we always get a strange grid in our baked lights and we have no idea why. We already tried everything from reseting, deleting stuff, looking for answers here and on the forums …
To find the source of the problem we made a test:
Starting from a blank scene there are no problems, two lights, one floorbox and one cylinder - the light baking reacts as it should.
Then we import some assets from our bugged scene, no other changes, just importing assets.
As soon as we rebuild the lighting grid artifacts appear and won’t go away, even if we delete the assets.
It seems that the bug stays in the scene no matter what we do - all baked lighting from that point will now have grid artifacts.
We have no idea what that it is or what’s causing it.
Maybe someone more experienced knows a solution for this bug?
Even a hint in the right direction would help us out because right now we really don’t know what to do.
You said you rebuilt your scene and imported some assets from your bugged scene. If I could get a screenshot of that I may be able to narrow this down for you. The direction I am leaning towards is that of the Light Maps themselves.
When you select your meshes and view the details panel, what have you set under “Overridden Light Map Resolution”?
If it has not been set I suggest you try cranking your resolution up to 256 or 512 and rebuild again.
The reaosn is that I do not see any problems in your screenshots, it simply looks like what low resolution static lightmaps typically look like, you see pixel filtering on a large scale indicating low resolution.
Even after cranking the resolution up some. You may want to add a directional light or sky light and look into lighting volumes. Without these baked static lighting and the shadows they create are lower quality as well.
Thank you for the time to think about our problem, but we have found the solution now.
The problem was linked to some textures we had in our project.
We were able to reproduce the problem just by creating a blank new scene and migrating one of the huge textures to the new project folder. As soon as we would open the texture in the editor or do any sort of operation involving it the baked Light Maps would “jump” from the correct resolution to this very low grid-like appearance in the editor and in-game.
The texture was 200MB big and initially for high-resolution offline rendering in 3dsmax. Resizing it solved the problem.
I hope this helps people that might encounter the same frustration we did
