Help with architecture lighting

Hello i am new to unreal engine.I am trying to achieve a good lighting but i followed tutorial from ue4arch lighting workflow.He mentioned to use only skylight.But if i am placing only skylight the scene is dark.Should i add exponential fog or something to make skylight work?
1)Could anyone please help me a nice light balance?I dont want to use the bounce card method as stated in ue4arch website because of external and internal viz problems.
If possible please provide a step by step tutorial for us noobs.There is no proper documentation.
2)I am getting strange shadows even though i added a 2nd uv channel.(i used flatten mapping from 3ds max)


As you can see i added a spotlight but the lighting is not realistic its just basic.pls i really need help

Your outer wall is one-sided, I would add some thickness and make an outside surface to block the lighting rather than making it two-sided though.

Also, make sure to build your lighting to see the results, and for you to be able to use baked lighting the lights need to be either Static or Stationary.

Ok but what about the skylight?

You can add a skylight too. It doesn’t really matter. You’ll still get bad results until you have an outer surface to block the light. You can also do two-sided geometry and two-sided materials. Build the lighting and see what happens.

What i am telling is that if i am adding only skylight as mentioned in the tutorial by ue4arch i am getting black scene with no lighting.Should i add exponential fog or something?
Should i use the bounce card method or use skylight method?

It is not only skylight, there is attached some hdri, check this http://rag3dviz.com/tutorial/hdri-lighting-in-unreal-engine/

Yeah, if you only have skylight, you need the fog too.

Also make sure to build your lighting after you’ve adjusted your meshes and lights

Thanks mate

After i build the lighting the walls are getting black splotches.I read in many forms to crank up the settings and change the base lightmass.ini file.I tried and the splotches are reduced but not completely gone.Any tips without increasing render time?

Did you make these walls in a 3d program like 3ds max? If so, did you UV unwrap them? What are the settings you are currently using?

If the shadows look blobby then you need to increase the lightmap resolution. The default is 64, which is very small and won’t work for most things.

Yeah, for archviz, shoot for 1024 for the walls. Sometimes higher. Although I’ve seen people use around 512 also. Just depends on the model size and how well it was unwrapped.

Capture.PNG

I use 3ds max flatten mapping for map channel2
I use lightmap resolution of 256
Here are the settings
Static Lighting Level = 0.25
NumHemisphereSamples = 256
IndirectPhotonDensity = 6000
IndirectIrradiancePhotonDensity = 3000
IndirectPhotonSearchDistance = 180
I am also getting weird shadows on props.I unwrapped it using 3ds max flatten mapping.
Capture.PNG

Don’t use the Automatic Flatten UV’s it does not give good results.
Also, make sure that walls/floors/ceiling don’t overlap each other, the surface that is blocked will still receive shadow and the shadow can bleed over into visible areas.

Auto flatting will not work. You should do it by hand. Plenty of tutorials for that. Also, For those shadows at the corners, make sure you have a post process volume around your level. Adjust it to where those shadows look better. ALSO, boost up the quality under project settings or whatnot.

If I was OP I would start using default lightmass ini unless he really know what he does. For lightmass good settings are 0.2 scale, 30 bounces, 2-10 quality and +/- 1 smoothness

I think Auto flatten works fine if you raise the lightmap resolution.
Here’s an example, it’s not perfect in the seams (lots of geo) but it’s good enough with a good leather texture that it’s not worth manually unwrapping at all!
Dimensiva model with 79k triangles. Surprising results given the lightmap it gave me…
49caa036dd7943f677a6279d6f0cbcbf3efe538e.jpeg
453d24070b66825be9d6147645ca1042d66be985.jpeg

Also, OP, the big black lines are either AO (turn it off, always looks better) or your lightmaps not loading correctly because your streaming pool is too small. Default is 1024 mb I think. You can use that command to increase it : r.Streaming.PoolSize xxxx

I also suggest you to use lightmass portals in your windows with your skylight if you are on ue 4.11 already.

Hey thanks man.I was getting really worried that i should manually unwrap everything by hand as i am lazy.But will try to increase the resolution of lightmass.I am using4.11 its pretty good actually.I found bounce card method producing more photorealism than skylight method.What do you think which method should i use?

That UV map is far from ideal, spending 10 minutes unwrapping it properly will allow you to use a much lower resolution lightmap, look better, and bake quicker.

Does anyone know how to change the uv grid size in 3ds max for lightmap.In a tutorial i saw he changes the grid size in maya.For example the lightmap resolution is 64 so he changes the grid size in maya by 64x64.How to do that in 3ds max.