I wish they’d add more control of portals, more along the line of mental ray/arnold .
same question @
Hi guys! Been following this thread for a while, and got amazing insights here on how to work the lightmass.
Nonetheless my adition is not so magnanimous.
I’m having some blotches showing up after the bake and I can’t figure out why. Increased lightmap resolution, verified UV’s, baked in production, but I’m still stuck with same problem.
Everything else seems to be ok (light is too strong and burning quite a lot)!
It’s strange cause I already used this model in previous works and never had this problem. Also the wall should be complanar and the shadow much smaller.
Is this due to indirect shadow?
Could be overlapping uv’s or a too low memory streaming pool. Do you get flickering shadows on that couch when you move around the scene?
No, no flickering. And I verified the uv’s and ther all correct. I adjusted the light and the result improved a little with the shadows getting softer. It seems to have improved.
Thanks nonetheless
GoogleDrive
Dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ljra2l3h070e67/FarshidNaji.zip?dl=0
Microsoft OneDrive
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ar7INFDcXdscgnWMCXW4AKFmf0Sa
Mediafire
4shared
http://www.4shared.com/zip/8ARByBcice/FarshidNaji.html
Uptobox
http://uptobox.com/s6m3icy2uknu
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thanks so much
I’m guessing a bit here but if the gap is too big and the shadow from the gap over the door is bleeding around to the wall then it’s most likely that you haven’t separated the polygons inside the gap from the wall polygons. Maybe this image helps (I made it a while ago for unreal 3 but it is still valid)
For the couches: We always have these problems with old high poly objects. It is really hard to make a good lightmap for a high poly object. Best is often to just bake a new low poly object off the high poly old vray asset.
Despite the general problems it might just be that your lightmap resolution is too low for the couch and the shadow is bleeding from one uv chart to another. (a too low lightmap resolution could also be caused by texture streaming issues but the scene seems to be small and not having any streaming issues.) Unreal is pretty good in rearranging the lightmap uv’s. You could try to reshuffle the uv charts in the mesh browser (built settings just after the material section). Use 1 as source and target uv channel, set the minimum resolution to maybe 128 or 256 and hit “apply”. Then make sure you increase the lightmap resolution further down in the static mesh settings as well.
Thank u @!
Appreciate the feedback and the input.
I tried what you said regarding the reshuffling the uv charts and apparently something worked.
Hello! I am curious about the indirect shadows in UE4. How do I make them more darker? Is it the combination of the intensities between the skylight and directional light (skylight is more intense than the direct light) or less indirect lightning from the directional light so the skylight can introduce those nice dark shadows etc. I tried a lot tests and I definitely get some shadows but I never manage to get them darker. I see alot from you guys that have nice dark shadows. What is the magic? 
I think this thread is great, but am still struggling to achieve decent results even after reading 's tutorials on his site. In the past I would always use koola’s lightroom as a baseline to start an archviz project, but now I am not so sure as he says his lightmass.ini is basically random numbers and he doesn’t know what many of the settings do either.
Anyways, what would help people like me tremendously would be an official Epic template with lighting that matches something like the Unreal Paris demo or Koola’s demos, made for archviz with sample portals. (the lightroom was great, but seems to not be well optimized either and didnt seem to use portals from what I can see) Some templates with HDRI, some with other methods like the light bounce method, or the lightmass portals would be great, and Epic’s “realistic rendering” demo was also not quite there.
But besides templates, even more detailed tutorials to achieve proper lighting on assets would be great. I am personally stuck on importing evermotion assets to this day. I add the second UV channel on the assets in 3DS max, unwrap with steamroller, second UV channel shows up perfectly flat in UE4, but still getting strange “UV’s are 7% overlapping” errors and just have to ignore them. This is going to sound cynical, but sometimes I wonder if templates and ultra detailed archviz tutorial videos aren’t made because it would hurt someone’s business here. Kind of like how the UE4arch guy deleted his nice tutorial post on this thread, like he had second thoughts or something? I’ve yet to see a full template or instructions that’s have helped me more than what Koola has provided by his lightroom source file on the marketplace. That is what we really need here, Epic designed templates of that quality but with the lightmass settings or portals, and skylight ready to go. That’s how we are going to be able to understand these settings better, what works and what doesn’t, we need a solid base to work from then to explore backwards from there.
For instance, this tutorial is excellent but of course no source file for it. Even with the instructions I have yet to achieve those results. With his HDRI tutorial everything is too dark. Also, I don’t completely agree with on on this thread that there is no need to mess with the lightmass.ini, especially after seeing jazvec’s images on the last page and how he said he did tweak it himself.
I feel that instead of protecting the knowledge we have individually acquired, we should really be spreading as much knowledge as we can to advance this as thing as whole. I know that as soon as I get this down that I will, because others did so for me. has made a really excellent effort at this though and I thank him for that and creating this thread. This is a step in the right direction.
Edit: Think I just found solution for my overlapping UV issues, wish I spoke spanish though!
Koolas scene has been updated for 4.13 to use portals and does not tweak the ini. No bounce cards either.
Oh man, that’s awesome! Thanks for letting me know. This is exactly what I am talking about actually. That’s the kind of stuff we need here and why I think he’s become a sort of archviz-celebrity of sorts. He’s builds excellent quality scenes and is willing to share what he has learned in the process.
HDRI Lighting_Shadowing issue
Hi @mihanix;
I had downloaded your project (TEST_HDR)…
Thank you very much for sharing your experience
In your project level (TEST_HDR_2_Sunny), I imported 3 assets of mine… their mobility is… Character (movable), an asset (movable), and another asset (Static)…
After building lighting (Production quality), I discovered a shadowing issue, it was that assets (set to movable) have no shadows as the static ones…!!
Can you please tell how to get shadows for movable assets when using HDRI lighting method…??
Best Regards
Put your lights to stationary if you want your movable meshes to have dynamic shadows.
YES; as you said…
Thanks for your advice
You can also look up capsule shadows.
Hallo guys! I am reading this post since few weeks and I thought I was ready to test all I learned.
But i’ve encountered many problems I do not understand and I hope you can help me.
Take a look at the image please:
You can see the black surfaces around windows and doors and the pure black lines near the floor and ceiling. Anyone know how can I fix this? The weird thing is that this effect occures not on every window and door as you can see!
My previews tests, when I was creating a scene similar to the one people was training on in this post (some walls and obstacles) went almost perfect. This one is much worse and I dont know what I am doing wrong.
My lightmass are correct, double check that. Any change to lighmaps does nothing to fix theese effects. Also smoothing groups are ok I think.
Is it something about the lightning? (I used this tutorial to light this scene 2/)
Or maybe i’ts something with the model it self? I created it in 3ds max sometimes using extrudes and sometimes bridge feature to create holes (windows, doors).
Please help
light portals rocks. everything at medium. no .ini mess and no overkill settings. baked in 10 minutes i think couldnt even finish my smoke lol
Do you think portals can overlap the wall, or they need to be exact same size as the window/door?
Nice image btw