So recently I have been using Unreal Engine 4 version 4.7. I have been working accordingly. But when hte “Lighting Needs To Be rebuilt” thing started getting to me, I researched it a little bit. So I hit the “Build Button”. Before I did, everything was fine. Now, everything is tiled in weird ways… for example take to normal cube meshes. One is a complete different shade then the one next to it. The only way to fix this is to add a light, but the whole point if my game is to have a dark atmosphere. Please help me out if possible. Thanks to anyone who replies!
Hi Imoutof1deas,
This shading difference between tiled meshes is known and something that can hopefully be improved in the future, but ultimately, it’s not an easy problem to solve.
You’re seeing this difference because each mesh that is baked with lighting will be sent to the CPU for lighting calculations and since each mesh is handled on different threads it can’t know exactly what the others calculations were.
Ideally, when building a scene with planar meshes where you can see the tiling there are some things you can do that can help.
- Use textures with Normals that can help mask any tiling light bake issue.
- Build meshes that are not broken up as much for tiling. This can also reduce the draw-calls to have a more effecient scene.
- Use other geometric meshes to cover/hide seams.
- In the World Settings > Lightmass: Change the Indirect Lighting Smoothness to be ~0.6 and the Indirect Lighting Quality to be 2 or higher. This will increase light build times though!
There are some other tricks that could help as well but these are common ones that can help get you started.
This thread contains some additional information, but I would recommend sticking to the ones above for the majority of cases.
I hope this helps.
Tim
I used all techniques, but none seemed to have an effect… if I package the project will it show the same way as in the editor
These techniques can work, but require setup and the content to be correctly setup as well, especially the UV Layout for the lightmap.
UE4 is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, so if you package the game it’ll look like it does in the editor.
If you don’t want to work with lightmaps or any static lighting you can alternatively set the lighting to Movable and hit the build button again to remove any static lighting information that was already processed.