I’m currently trying to find the best way to achieve this kind of clay renderish look:
Materials shouldn’t be much of a problem, but I’m actually having problems with the lighting and shadows as the “map” will be viewn from a distance (like in the preview pic of the above mentioned video) but there are certain areas where the player/user could zoom in.
My first idea was to bake light maps with stationary lights…using movable lights only for things like cars and other movable objects.
But somehow the light maps give me a lot of errors like for example:
(No idea why this is happening…the polygons are all closed…no sign of this kind of structure in the mesh)
My second approach was to use movable lights, which gave me ok’ish shadows close up…
but as soon as I moved away the shadows got blurry and finally vanished…
I’m aware that the cascade shadows work this way, but I didn’t find any setting that would increase the range in which the shadwos look crisp…and the shadows really blurred out before even getting close to the distance I needed.
The first approach had this too, but on a smaller scale I would say.
So does anyone have any hints on how I could approach such a look?
Or if I’m totally missing on something that would help?
It surely must be possible somehow?
I also tried the distance volume thing but this doesn’t seem to do anything either… I’m currently kind of lost so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Where is the best place to put the console command to see its effect in the editor view?
I tried placing it in a execute console command node in my game modes construction script but I can’t really see any differences, so I’m not sure if it even is the right place to use it.
Thanks for your help, this improved the dynamic shadow variant, but it still gets blurry rather fast…
I also think, as you recommended, that baking would be better, as in the end there will be a lot of objects on the map. But as shown above, I get really weird bakes no matter how I unwrap (or try to use Unreals own lightmap uv generator)
Plus I have the same problem as with the first variant: The shadows fade out way too fast and the before mentioned settings don’t seem to have any impact on that neither.
If anyone has any hints there it would be greatly appreciated!
Hey,
I created the lightmap UVs in Blender unchecked the automatic lightmap creation on import. I checked on the static mesh if my lightmap is there and used and everything seems fine there. I increased the lightmap resolution (tried all sorts of resolutions already)
In my scene there’s a directional light set to stationary and a sky light, also set to stationary.
My build settings are at Production level also the engine scalability is set to epic / cinematic.
After finishing the build my shadows on the small building start to look like in the example pic above.
It looks like some kind of fence…though I double checked the mesh time and time again and have no clue how such lightmaps could get built.
So any advice would be great!
Of course https://ufile.io/3o74i
The lighting seems to be weird on the floor two. I changed my light sources to static now and this seems to get rid of some of the “fence” shadows…though I can’t imagine that it’s not possible to bake a nice shadow with stationary lights.
The boxes are the Light importance volume (which encases the whole building area)
a post processing volume, as I tried to get a clearer contour when far away by playing with the AO settings in there.
My light importance volume is actually enclosing the whole “map” (all of the buildings) so that wasn’t really the problem.
I created a completely new project and redid everything now the bake looks ok.
And the shadows hold up rather long.
So it’s back to figuring out how to get better view distances (e.g. for the ambient occlusion, which fades out rather drastically)
For my scene I would need to combine stationary and movable lights, as there will be cars and things like that moving through the scene, the rest could be, indeed, baked.
Stationary light is all you need, unlike static lights (which works only with baked lighting and static objects) stationary lights are benefit from both - they will use baked lighting for static objects and dynamic lighting for movable objects.
