if these are emissive materials lights try adding very weak point lights next to them, ive had problems with purely emissive lighting creating blotches and dead areas.
What were the Lightmass settings for this render? I’m talking about the 4.11 Preview Render? and What kind of light setup did you use? The quality of the shadows look spectacular and I am interested, since my studio is planning and working on a huge multiplayer game, in which we want the best of rendering results. Thank you
those are point lights. all static. i have like 40 of those in the scene.
these are the settings im using:
its 4.11 preview.
lightmaps are still very low.
(*settings im using for test renders)
Quality: Production (*medium/high)
Static Lighting Level=0.2 (*1)
Num Indirect Lighting=100 (*70)
Indirect Lighting Quality=10 (*1)
IndirectPhotonEmitConeAngle=3
NumHemisphereSamples=128
NumIrradianceCalculationPhotons=4000
DirectIrradiancePhotonDensity=1000
IndirectPhotonDensity=10000
IndirectIrradiancePhotonDensity=7000
I never knew how much that RecordRadiusScale setting in the .ini influenced the shadows. It’s the only thing that has changed between the two screenshots
Especially check out the shadows of the box on the floor towards the camera.
this is 4.11 with portals / medium built / static lighting level scale 1.0 / indirect lighting bounces 70 / indirect lighting quality 1.0 / indirect lighting smoothness 1.0
and a skylight with a hdr map
Thats really cool Sunchaser! Another value to play around with
Reducing the smoothing will have the opposite effect, the shadows will be even harder. You can lower you solution quality for smoother shadows and lower rendering times. Anyway I guess we are all focusing on the wrong aspect, yes the indirect shadows are important but in my opinion the biggest jump in realism is in the post-processing area. Check this gif Moritz Weller made on his article about Koola work. Changing the LUT is what really makes a difference in a room made of boxes. I made this gallery(download them all and view in fullscreen) just pushing around the exposed parameters and I think that a somewhat soft solution with some AO in post can work. Unfortunately seems to me that increasing the solution quality, while giving nice indirect shadows, also increases those pencil drawn edges. It would be beneficial to have a way to paint on the lightmap, like a spot heal brush. But above all a way to dial the indirect illumination smoothness: a buffer where to store the unblurred solution and the option to dial the percentage of filtering before deciding to commit.
[QUOTE=Sunchaser;484947]
I never knew how much that RecordRadiusScale setting in the .ini influenced the shadows. It’s the only thing that has changed between the two screenshots
Especially check out the shadows of the box on the floor towards the camera.
this is 4.11 with portals / medium built / static lighting level scale 1.0 / indirect lighting bounces 70 / indirect lighting quality 1.0 / indirect lighting smoothness 1.0
and a skylight with a hdr map
It looks like it’s getting more bounces in the .8 version.
Hey guys,i did test with 4.11 on my latest project,and i was happy to saw some improvement in new version 4.11(Embree and Protal)
These screenshot below shows difference between 4.9 and 4.11(not include “movable” actor i noted:①②③，and exposure between 2 images）
I used X5660 x2 *8 server to build lightmass in distributed way.
4.9 settings:
default lightmass.ini
Lighting Quality set to High
Level scale 0.1
Indirect Lighting Bounces 100
Indirect Lighting Quality 10
Indirect Lighting Smoothness 0.5
No AO
Compress Lightmaps On
Build time 5h
4.11 settings:
default lightmass.ini
Lighting Quality set to Medium
Level scale 0.1
Indirect Lighting Bounces 100
Indirect Lighting Quality 10
Indirect Lighting Smoothness 0.5
No AO
Compress Lightmaps On
Build time 1h
4.9
4.11
4.9
4.11
4.9
4.11
4.9
4.11
4.9
4.11
4.9
4.11
Two Tips in distributed build:
1:
4.11 need to setup "Net Framework 4.5"on each PCs.
2:
4.11 need to setup "Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable"on each PCs.
hey everyone -
been following this thread for awhile. got an issue.
lighting my scene (haven’t adjusted the lightmass.ini) but regardless, not sure why these walls are black. the lightmap res is 1024.
any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Check the normals for the black walls. Are the walls static or moveable? Which material are you using for the black walls?
thanks for the reply. so my normal were fine - however, in my uv setup - i had planes overlapping (to save space) but the result were the black walls. 
so i did an autoflatten on the uv’s and voila! fixed.
thanks again - that was seriously bugging me out!
Hi everyone,
Regarding lightmass, how is a mesh best imported in UE?
Let’s say you use Blender or Max to model an element (a guitar for example).It has multiple surfaces that have different materials.After unwraping, do you import it as 1 object, or separate.
Does this have an impact in performance?guessing it should
Also, does the scale of the objects affect how the lightmap is computed?
Thanks.
Is it me or have I not seen too many people enable GI in PostProcessingVolume (or anywhere else) before ?
Does anybody have input on Skylight settings for an indoor scene with a visible exterior? I find it’s not lighting the interior of my scene very well but starts to looks good when I bump up the intensity between 10-20. The problem with that is it makes the exterior road look super washed-out. Using a HDRI and skylight, with pretty typical lightmass settings (no *.ini edits). Are there other settings you can use to increase the GI brightness?
Secondly, I’m getting this odd shadow on the exterior of my building. Has anyone experienced this? I’m assuming its an easy fix but can’t seem to find anyone else having the same issue.
Thanks everyone, as always.
Your “environment” is projecting shadows? did you check the ´s hdri tutorial?
Yeah that’s what I followed, I will double check the tutorial though. Thanks
You can always change the value (make them darker) of your exterior materials if it’s only interior shots. I thought people were using two post processing volumes in such instances? And you can play with the exposure control in the post processing volume.
I forgot all about people using two post processing volumes. I should just start DM’ing you my questions directly !
The box on the ground was caused by my box reflection capture. I just increased the size to encompass the whole scene. Not sure if that’s proper but it seemed to do the trick.