to help prevent lightmap bleeding and when I first started level designing, I was under the impression, that it was best to use modular pieces to build your environment. However, I then came across with some light bleeding issues in-between my modular pieces. I have done some research, mentioning, trying to limit the number of your modular pieces, especially areas where 2 or more modular pieces butt-up against each other along a flat planar direction, and those type of meshes should be combined into 1 mesh. Furthermore, I even found information about UV light maps needing special attention in how they are laid out and the spacing between each UV island/shell. So I tried making theses changes, by merging planar walls, and I tried light mapping my meshes manually as well as allowed UE4 generating light maps for me. However, for the life of me, whether my meshes are modular or a single mesh, I get terrible shadows along all of the edges, and not just corner edges.
Sounds really complicated problem. You may try to use YouTube to troubleshoot this problem.
Looks like you may have some issues with the mesh or UV maps since I can still see some seams that look like they’re due to separate meshes.
If you merged a mesh then make sure to weld the sections together and remove any unnecessary loops and then check your lightmap UV’s to make sure that the walls are complete and are correct.
After that, if you’re reimporting to UE4 then make sure that the lightmap UV channel is set to use the correct UV channel, and make sure that automatic lightmap UV’s generation isn’t enabled.
I apologize for the confusion of the image. The image to the right was not suppose to be part of this topic. I actually did not take notice of this until late last night, where I accidentally screen captured both monitors, and I did not want to fix it because this thread was already uploaded.
Otherwise, thanks to Decorix, who pm’ed me about making sure that my UV’s where snapped to grid. At first, I was going to post back to him, stating that Blender does not have an accurate way of setting the grid to specific sizes, as the grid increment snapping changes along with zooming in/out of the editor window. However, I found out that the grid snapping feature in 3ds Max works the same way as “snap to pixel” inside of Blender. So in Blender, it is as simple as using “snap to pixel” and adding the same resolution map size in the UV editor as you would use in your lightmap. So now, I am only getting artifacts because I am in preview render mode, which I understand will improve when I do my final bake.
Once again thank you all for your help.
BTW, I do not see the Marked as answered feature, so I am stating it here and to please consider this as answered.