Questions that I'm sure have simple answers, yet I can't find any.

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

Hello Unreal world,

So I’m attempting my first Archviz level because I think it’s a good starting point leading into environmental design for games. Just started and already ran into a snag. After the snag is fixed, I have a few follow up questions.

Background: I’m knowledgeable with 3dsmax as I have been using it for about 7 years. I have pumped out many a arch render using mental ray (not a fan of V-ray) and now want to take it to a completely new level by utilizing UE4.

Problem: I usually model with boxes for walls and then extrude the edges etc until I have a wall system, then build interior walls, UVW Map, apply mat, done. This seems wasteful in UE4 because I want to keep poly’s low. So I modeled this interior using planes. I know planes are only visible from one side, that’s fine. All worked out great and loaded it up, set up, lined up, beautiful. I build the lighting and it’s like the floor and ceiling do not exist. So I copy and pasted the floor and ceiling, rotated them 180 and now they block the light. Is there a way to set the poly’s to 2 sided (although I thought I have it checked). What am I doing wrong?

Follow ups: I hate unwrapping. Everyone does. But I did it. I unwrapped all the walls and then created another unwrap and just did a standard flat mapping and moved that unwrap to channel 2. That’s it. Proper or wrong?

Second, I see people fuss with their light ini file. Why? Should I?

Third, I’m using the default scene with a sky sphere, fog, and sunlight. Should I delete all those? Maybe a different kind of light?

Lastly, can I be pointed to a place that helps me set all the settings right? I’ve never done this.

Thank you in advance! Here’s what I’m working on…

2
  1. enable two sided in the material
  2. that’s how to create a 2nd uv channel: :// (make sure to disable the auto lightmap generation in the import window)
  4. That depends on your scene and how you want it to look like :wink:
  5. the documentation might help you : https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/
3

Boom boom boom and boom. Thank you for the perfect answers that I was looking for. bookmarked.

4

Regarding the .ini files, I’ve seen multiple Epic Games staff members warning not to mess with them unless you have very specific and informed reasons for doing so. Most of those settings can be increased from within the editor: World Settings > Lightmass Settings

Increase your “Num Indirect Lighting Bounces” to something greater than 4. This only provides improvements to a certain extent. Anything past 4 or so doesn’t do much, but also doesn’t cost much, so why not. Mine is 100.

Increase your “Indirect Lighting Quality” as high as you want, like 3 or 6 or 10. It will increase build times, but helps resolve a lot of errors and bleeding.

Decrease your “Indirect Lighting Smoothness” to something like 0.7 if you increased the Quality. This gives more accurate and sharp indirect shadows.

This should take care of most technical Lightmass settings that most of us have no clue about tweaking inside the .ini config file.

5

Thank you very much. That’s actually really close to how I have it set up right now!