Is light mass still relvant?

Development Rendering
1

Light mass has always frustrated me because it requires extremely precise maps that have always eluded me. Then finally when I bake my scene it come out looking like a potato anyway. So being that I am running at 120 fps with out static lighting, and also 120 fps with a light mass… What is the point?

I am pulling my hair out trying to get rid of my 1.3% of overlapping UVs. Let me overlap my UVs damnit!

Also-- curious for the unreal engine devs-- will light mass apply in UE 5. Freeing us from the limitation of no overlapping UVWs will be a god send to my work flow. It has always been a big headache.

Here is the scene with RTX ray tracing I am really happy with it, prepping it for the marketplace and trying to get to no overlapping UV’s and going a bit crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWMY…QuxNCnp4AaABAg

2

If you’re making something for market place, then you probably need to get the UV sorted, because the end user may well be using static lighting.

Static lighting is still better than dynamic, if you know what you’re doing. Agreed, it’s a minefield.

But also, why bother if it’s looking good and you have plenty of frames left to play with… :slight_smile:

3

Sure I mean ideally it sounds good. But what was throwing me off was that it was coming from the auto UV set-- not mine. I think I finally understand what and why it is happening. It seems to only really happen on some imports of the same assets, like I can import the same window frame and some times it will have overwrapping UV’s and some times no. So I am thinking it has more to to do with the auto UV sets that get made on import.

If I import the wall mesh and then the window mesh separate-- no overlapping UVs, I can then place things into BPs for the level build out-- but yeah like you said, what’s the point if you got frames to spare. Ill be happy when light mass is not required! Till then I’ll be grinding.

4

Currently it’s still required to get nice lighting at a good framerate

As for the UV’s, the auto-UV generation that UE4 does is not a complete solution, it uses existing UV’s and simply applies a flattening algorithm, so if you don’t have your seams set up already then it doesn’t do that part for you.
Also, auto-generation doesn’t do that good of a job so it’s better to make them yourself and turn that option off.

If you’re getting overlapping UV’s warnings it could also be that your lightmap resolution is too low, it’ll give the same warning if a pixel of the lightmap goes across multiple UV seams