So, i’m currently building my first level and I struck on this issue: my lightning quality seems to decrease drastically once building my lightning. I’m talking about an asset created by me, so the problem might be its lightmaps, though I already tried modifying it more times. I also tried increasing lightmap resolution from 128 to 2048 but nothing much seems to change. I’m attaching files providing the two outputs and the lightmap of said asset. Thanks in advance
Hi!
Could you post your lightmass settings? Maybe it’s not counting that detailed or you blur out the result with smoothness…
Is the surface material of it reflective at all? If it is, would changing the Roughness and/or Metallic value change the amount of noise?
Try unchecking “Compress Lightmaps” in World Lightmass Settings.
Is raytracing on for the project? If yes, then are RT Global Illumination settings enabled? what are those?
The default setting will give you a basic result!
Right now the accuracy is 1cm /no smaller detail will be calculated/
And most of the result is blurred out (smoothness 1)
Also only these areas receive the lighting information you’re after!!
(sry can’t upload the pic)
…you can count how many pixels are covering that area with a way too low (>256) lightmap: a few! That won’t give you proper results either!
So you need to set higher lightmass settings (0.1 for scale and 0.6 smoothness) and also a higher res lightmap (512 <) + hopefully you have importance volume covering the area…
Also as mentioned: turning off lightmap compression also gives you a cleaner result!
thank you for your explaination! I played with some settings a bit, and i’m starting to get some results.
Thanks everyone for your answers so far! I’ve been struggling for a while with this issue and I was fixated on modifying my lightmaps over and over again, without trying anything else. I’m planning to develop my first game with this props, and I am clueless on which lightmass settings and lightmap texel density and resolution I should aim for, since I am a complete beginner, can you give me some advice?
(lightmap set at a resolution of 512x512)
There is no material as i’m testing the lightmaps of my props as I finish mapping them (tell me if I do anything wrong), and raytracing is off for this project. Unchecking “Compress Lightmaps” did produce far better results as you can see from the screenshots I’ve uploaded, Thanks!
The props are using a default material type, which appears noisy no matter what you do. It has a perlin noise built into it. If Starter Content was enabled for the project, there’s a folder called Materials that has some to apply to objects. Try one of the flat, smooth materials that are either white / grey to see how it looks on the props. It’ll help in seeing how the shading is going much easier than the default material that’s currently on those. I didn’t notice it was the default material before when I replied.
To check your UV mapping, or texture mappings, open a mesh in the editor (e.g., the desk mesh) by right-clicking and selecting “Open asset_name here…”. Then in the mesh editor, there’s a toolbar above. Click Channels dropdown, click Channel 1 to display it. Select Show UVs, which is also in the toolbar above. If the UVs aren’t in Channel 1, but instead in Channel 0 or 2, then select one of those. To check what channel UVs are in, go to LOD settings in the mesh editor (at the right), and expand Build Settings. Destination Lightmap Index is the channel that the UV mappings are saved in, while Source LM Index is the channel the UV mappings were generated from. So, Destination is the channel they’re currently in.
Lightmass settings would be better to start at 1 for Static Level Scale, not lower. Increase quality, and adjust smoothness according to the look of the game. Higher smoothness might be applicable for a stylized graphics game (such as Borderlands), or for certain kinds of lighting situations / rooms / scenes, but it reduces directionality of lighting…at least according to the engine tooltips lol.
Use more dynamic lighting for traversable areas of the game because that’s where things change more. Not that static isn’t optimal for those areas, yet it’s easier to work with dynamic lighting when there’s a bunch of characters and other things that change during run-time of the game. I’m a beginner too, and this is a summary of my perspective on how to do those aspects of lighting in Unreal Engine. Don’t only listen to me, obviously, as there are more experienced and knowledgeable people in the forums and elsewhere. Watch a few youtube videos on the subjects of lighting, light types and how to use them, and how certain games were made in Unreal Engine (if those can be found).
Don’t worry about texel density until you know more about the basics of how lighting works, and how to design particular lighting setups: daytime / outdoor lighting, night lighting, indoor lighting, and some lighting effects (such as soft shadows, two-sided, foliage and landscapes, how materials figure in). Texel density is for micro-managing the memory and processor usage to fine-tune for performance. Don’t fiddle with it until there’s a problem, though I’m not saying to avoid it entirely until then. Sometimes the experts here will weigh in with their suggestions of reducing texel density, and you could easily get fixated on it and not really know what you’re doing. And only the suggestion from experts isn’t teaching you how to correct things for a certain case, unless it’s a more detailed and explained suggestion. Just use the engine more than trying to get advice, is my suggestion.
thanks for your time, I’ll follow your advices.