Seriously? Unless you start out ahead of time, already knowing how bad the UE lightmap system is, you have no chance getting your assets correctly mapped the first time.
You need to create a seperate UV map especially for lightmaps but it’s a pain if you’ve already finished your models without knowing this. Once you make the discovery, you’ll need to go through your whole model (game map) from scratch, remapping piece by piece (walls, stairs, etc) and even then you may find issues. Also, you cannot simply use flatten mapping on .
This is terrible, considering there are other game engines out there which are fully capable of doing this entire job via “baking” by simply clicking a button.
I’d like to know your thoughs on this. Will this get fixed?
You can bake your 2nd uv channel in the engine, but you wont get a good result ^^ -> double click onto the static mesh in the content browser - window - generate unique uvs - change some settings and click onto apply
Otherwise you could also take a look at a uv generator like blender has it: (not the best way -> doing them manually is better)
Or use dynamic lighting
Here you can get more information about lightmaps:
As promised, I didn’t get a good result at all.
Also, through further observation I just noticed that when using dynamic lighting, UE erroneously calculates open faces in 3d models so you sometimes get light underground such as this:
://i57.tinypic/28artas.jpg
The icing on the cake:
://i57.tinypic/iy30qw.jpg
I hope I’m missing some hidden checkbox or something.
Not entirely true. If your texture UVs do not overlap and have sufficient padding, you can use them as well for lightmaps.
The fact that lightmaps require non overlapping UVs is quite trivial. Shadows will cast different on each surface. How would you do this without suitable UV maps.
You could also use exclusively movabale lighst and ignore static lighting altogether.
Well then hooray to the otherr engine… pff :rolleyes:
The baking in UE4 is also incredibly simple. just hit Build and off you go…
Oh yes, one can. Maybe you cannot do it, but others, me included, can.
This is my usual workflow after i textured an object.
-Add another UVW unwrap modifier
choose channel 2 (move the UVS)
open UV editor
select all polygons
click on flatten (with a padding of 0.005 to prevent bleeding)
Thats it. Then exporting and done.
Can you oprovide some example files you have problems with?
And with UE4 it comes “out of the box”. In Unity, you have to buy the, obscenely expensive, pro version to have any decent lighting at all…
But I have to admit, sometimes I also dream of engines that use realtime raytracing
I think is your own fault, most probable you have overlapped UV or/and non uniform scale => result bad lightmaping in **any **tool. Secondary UV for lightmap is a piece of cake to have it, once you have a CORRECT UV on a model. You can even go forward and have special secondary UV for lightmap, to use density where is the point of interest.
Still, I have to agree with OP. Lightmaps in UE suck and there is simply no other way to put it. The most frustrating thing is that before rebuilding lighting engine presents you with perfect looking “shadowing”, which means that the engine “knows” how it should look, but after rebuilding you get this “c**p”.
Don’t get me wrong, I love UE but lightmaps is one of the weakest point in this engine.
I might be wrong here, but I think the reason for the “good” shading in the viewport is due to the fact that it is using dynamic lighting. Set all your pointlights to movable and observe the effect
The caveat with this: Its not very performant. And in the viewport it doesnt have to be.
And sometimes I get very crappy looking before-build lighting too.
@KVogler
The point here is that engine “knows” how it should look (in my experience 100% of time), and I as a user shouldn’t really do the job that is best done by computer. The “shading” is already there! It should be as simple as click of a button. But it is not and in my opinion lightmaps are really one of weakest points of UE.
Perhaps you dont know the (technical) difference between dynamic lighting and prebaked lightmap shading.
What it comes down to is: Dynamic shading always looks nicer than baked lighting.
As I said, use dynamic lighting only, thus dont using any baked lighting, and you will get the same nice result as in the viewport, but beware:
this really eats up performance.
In Unity, you have to buy the, obscenely expensive, pro version to have any decent lighting at all…