As the title suggest, i need some help. I’ve generally worked with other engines in smaller degrees and only done lighting in 3Ds max earlier, so it’s pretty new to me when it comes to Unreal Engine, which I’m also quite new with.
So to get right into it, i have two problems. One is that the light reflects through the wall and there is light reflection in the roof and on the floor, despite the light source being placed in another room. Another issue i have with this, is that you can see the reflection (as if the light was straight above you) of the “light bulb” from all the light sources as you walk around the rooms. The issue with this one is that you can see every one of them, despite there are only a small amount in each room.
While the first issue might have a easy explanation, i don’t really know where to look for the second one. And i’ve already spent hours a day to fix most of my issues so far, so now i’m here to ask the basic questions on the forum.
Last i was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to brighten the light up a little bit in the scene so it’s not pitch black, i can’t re-call what i did with the basic lighting, as i started in the Third Person package, but i know i can import them from another project. The setting is to be a horror scenario, and to remain dark where there is no intended light. However, it needs to be possible to navigate and make out, which i had an issue with earlier, and now that I’ve made it pitch black, i don’t see how i should light it up just slightly with the light sources being Point Light and Spot Lights. I’ve read a ton of stuff, and i use the manual most of the time, but now I’m at a full stop and don’t really know what to do in terms of lighting.
For anyone who helps me out, or just took your time to read this, thanks a bunch for your time! I can’t say how grateful i am!
My guess is most of your meshes don’t have proper UVs for a light map, that’s why some things are black and you are getting errors and artifacts. UE4 automatically tries to create light map UVs for an asset based on the existing UVs, and you can view what it created by opening up the static mesh, clicking on the uv button and changing the uv channel drop down to UV Channel 1.
Also make sure when you are building you change the lighting quality to production (option is under build). The preview lighting renders leave a lot of artifacts, and as long as the level is small (and the lighting settings are reasonable) a production build doesn’t take long.
You could set up the scene for dynamic lighting, but for a simple interior scene, baked lighting is the way to go. You’ll get better results and less artifacts, but you do have to suffer through creating proper UVs that will work for light maps, and baking. Also you will need to set the light map resolution for each mesh, start small and work you way up, something like the tub should probably be 256, the floor and walls 512, the sink 128, etc. You can change your viewport from lit to light map density after baking to see if your light map resolution is reasonable.
Thanks a bunch, will have to try this out later today, or tomorrow should i not have time. But the things you said, really looks like it would do a trick or two. Thank you so much for your time, and I’ll come back to this when i have had the time to test it out
Thanks ZacD, a lot of it helped me out, and worked nicely, so i just gotta figure out the numbers, make a propper UV map in 3Ds max as the asset i got didn’t have proper UV maps made for them. I usually went around with Medium to avoid having “Preview” all over the scene, and with Production it becomes really dark at first, but thats just adjusting the lighting a little more
Been setting the light map resolution on most of them, and have improved them as well, thanks so much!
And , i did have the standard Reflection capture in the scene, but deleted it yesterday before i went to sleep. I can open up a new scene and pick it up from there again with copy pasting, but i assume it was the refflection capture that caused the annoyance with the reflection of the light source all over the house? Thanks for your time and help as well!
On the note of reflection captures, I’m not sure when to use them. Is it whenever there’s something metallic/reflective or liquid, or just in general should I place them around no matter what the scene consists of?
Also, how’d you get everything so dark? I have the opposite problem where everything is illuminated. Weirdly this becomes a big problem the further down you go in the map (in Z). I thought it was a post-process thing since I have one of those placed in the scene but after fiddling with its settings I can’t place the issue.
There should be a reflection capture actor touching every part of the scene. Epic suggests using them in 3 layers, for example you have on big one for an entire room, and anything really reflective and will have noticeable reflections will have another reflection capture in front of them. There’s some examples and diagrams on the wiki.
