Sometimes you get very different shading on modular pieces and this is not a uv layout fault. I read somewhere that this occurs when the pieces are calculated on different lightmass render-threads. You can improve the quality by adjusting the smoothness and other tweaks, but this doesn´t work always.
It would be great to group meshes into “render groups”. I´m not talking about combining them, just grouping them and the engine knows to render these pieces on the same thread. This would help to increase quality on large modular areas, i.e. floors and walls.
Ideally when building modular assets it’s best not to build your assets in a way that over uses modularity. If you were to do so then using the methods described in KVogler’s link above is the best solution.
Some things that will help with this:
These assets need to be imported as larger pieces.
Properly setup lightmap UVs with decent resolutions dependent on size of the geometry
Use other geometry to mask these seams
Adjusting the following in World Settings > Lightmass Tab:
Indirect Lighting Quality: 2 (maybe higher, but will increase light build times)
Some of the settings in there that are changed I would NOT recommend changing unless you know what you’re doing or unless you were doing Arch Viz and needed this for much smaller scenes.
Eric and I are planning to revisit the Wiki Lighting Troubleshooting and Tips guide that we made ages ago. We still have a bunch that we would like to get up there for basic troubleshooting and tips to help everyone in the community.
This is definitely one area I do want to focus a little bit of time on rather than always linking to a buried forum thread.
Definitely.
Based on the expiriences I gathered over the last year, my best tip is:
-Separate the geometry always at angles less than 180deg.
-If a coplanar seam is unavoidable (sometimes they really are), try place it in direct light to drown out the seams caused by the indirect lighting.
Im currently making a little testlevel where I use this technique extensively.
Maybe Ill make a post later in the Rendering forum to illustrate…