Lighting looks "burnt" on blender models

Development Rendering
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1

Ok I have no idea what I am doing wrong. I have created a wall that is part of building in blender, added textures/normal map, smart unwrapped then made another smart unwrapped name lightmap. But no matter what I do when my model has a shadow cast on it the shadow looks “burnt” or unnatural. Any idea/pointers would be great.

18170-badlighting.png
18170-badlighting.png1507×603 903 KB

2

Things to check:

-Does the lighting need rebuilt?

-Is your lightmap of high enough resolution?

-Are you sure your model is set to have hard edges in blender and that you do not have any double faces or inverted normals?

3

Thanks for the quick reply.

I have rebuilt the lighting. It actually looks good when I first import it, its after I build the lighting it looks like that.

In the image my lightmap res in blender is at 1024x1024, in UE4 for that static mesh the res is 128. Does this setting need to be higher? Does that take up a lot of resources?

I am new to blender/3d modeling. I watched a video of how to create hard edges and it looks the same after I did that. I don’t think i have any double faces or inverted normal’s, any easy way to tell?

Thanks for your help.

4

You don’t actually need to set up any sort of image for the lightmap in blender at all, just the UV layout. I would test using a higher rez than 128 just to rule that out as the issue.

5

18181-badlighting1.jpg
18181-badlighting1.jpg1640×620 164 KB

This is 1024. It is better but it still looks not as clean.

I am starting to think its my actual model. I took a cube made it into an “L” and the shadow on it looks perfect.

6

Also make sure your UVs are non-overlapping. If they overlap, then lightmass baking could result in weird output.

However I do get artifacts like that when exporting models from blender. Still haven’t figured out what the issue is. Using smooth shading in blender is the main culprit. But it looks like you are exporting in ‘flat’ mode.

Things to check:

  • Make sure face normals are not inverted
  • Check for duplicate and overlapping faces and lone edges.
  • Check the FBX export options and make sure 'Mesh is selected and ‘Only selected’ is checked.
  • Also try to do a render in belnder and see if the same issue happens there.