Hi, I’m looking to achieve the maximum quality I can get from UE4 for my renders (obviously still being renderable), and I noticed something that led me to believe I might be missing some steps in that direction…
I was playing around with LODs in some of the static meshes in a scene, and to my surprise, simply changing the LOD group of a mesh while keeping the lightmap resolution the same it was before made it look better after baking, specifically how light interacted with it…
I have no idea what changing that setting does, but it made things look better even if there was only one LOD for that mesh (I believe, I didn’t make any other LODs myself)
Because of that, I suspect that when I use the mesh without tweaking some settings I’m not really making it look the best it can possibly look. The same goes for textures.
So I ask you knowledgeable people, what settings do you know I can change to make meshes and textures look the best possible? The only one I know for textures is disabling mipmaps.
There’s a few options that are specific for super high poly and glossy or reflective surfaces like cars.
Disabling texture compression.
There’s a bunch settings for dynamic objects, but for very specific use cases.
Increasing the texture streaming pool.
Removing light mass compression.
The most important thing for screen shots is just bumping up the resolution/resolution scaling.
And the second most important thing is making or optimizing assets specifically for use with real time engines. A clean model with a proper lightmap and good materials is still going to look better than something just thrown into the engine, even with the settings cranked up.
What was your LOD group setting and have you explored it any more? If you’re going for max quality ArchViz, I wouldn’t expect there to be LODs anyway. Are you sure it was specifically affecting the lightmap of that object?
Usually I leave the LOD group thing alone on the default setting which is ‘None’. And all I know is that changing that setting to something other than, SmallProp for example, made the indirect shadows cast by it (on itself and other objects) look slightly better. I haven’t played around with it and I remember it was either SmallProp or LargeProp that I set it to when I noticed this.