Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on a small third-person exploration project in Unreal Engine 5.4, and I recently ran into an issue with my lighting build that I can’t seem to solve. I was hoping someone here might be able to offer some guidance or suggestions.
Basically, after building the lighting, a lot of my static meshes (especially walls and floors) look extremely flat and washed out, even though they have proper UVs and lightmaps. It almost feels like there’s no proper shadowing applied. I’ve checked the following:
- Lightmap UVs (they’re auto-generated and look clean)
- Lightmap resolution (set to 64–128 for most assets)
- Lighting quality set to “Production”
- Static lights and directional light are properly set
I also tried switching between Lumen and traditional lightmass, but the result didn’t improve much.
What’s strange is that in the editor preview, everything looks fine with dynamic lighting on. But once I bake the lighting, things turn super bland.
Has anyone else experienced this with UE5.4? Could this be a bug or maybe something I missed during the lighting setup? Any help, tips, or even similar stories would be greatly appreciated 
Thanks in advance!
Cheers,