Low quality shadows cast by static lights

I’m seeing very low quality shadows produced by static lights. I’m running out of ideas. My settings seem like they should produce higher quality shadows so I’m wondering if I’m missing something obvious or if it’s a bug.

I made a simple test level using starter and built-in engine content. I’m using 4.18.3, forward renderer on a Mac. Building at higher quality seems to have no effect. Lightmap compression is off.

Here are my lightmass settings…

Stationary light lightmap resolution and baked result…

Spotlight lightmap resolution and baked result…

Most likely your lightmap resolution is too low (for the floor mesh), try changing it in the meshes’ setting.

231150-bd8d8566b9e331065037eed6e7fded33.png

Thanks for replying but you can see by my attached images that the resolution is more than sufficient. If I raise it any higher it has negligible effects. It even turns into a blotchy mess if I raise it too high (ie. 2048).

In that case theres only a few things I can think of: First check your projects render settings, check if putting it on “Epic” etc. changes anything. If that doesn’t do anything see if it has to do with scale. Are you using correct units of measurement? For example, 180 units are 180cm if your model is a factor 10 or 100 of that could cause things like this.

And the last thing I can come up with now is your lightmap UV layout. Is that cube/plane the only thing unwrapped on it? (Is the actual 2048x2048 used for the majority of the model instead of just a tiny part?)

Hope any of these work. Good luck!

No problem, glad it got you to find the problem and fix it!

Thanks Stilettofern! Your line of questioning forced me to take another look at everything related to scale. I see that I had scaled the ground mesh inside the level. Changing the mesh’s scale back to 1 fixed the shadow!