I’ve been reading a lot about this problem, but everything I’ve tried hasn’t figured it out, so here I go.
Once I build the lighting (Production Quality) here’s what it looks like :
You can see the shadows being very blocky. The resolution of the light map is set to 128, so I don’t think that’s the issue. Here’s the Lightmap UV of the static mesh too :
As you can see, all UV Shells are laid out nicely with space in between them. Also, there’s a Lightmass Importance Volume covering the level.
World Settings :
Static Lighting Level Scale : 0.1
Indirect Light Bounces : 50
Indirect Lighting Quality : 5
Indirect Lighting Smoothness : 0.5
Environment Colour : Black
Ambient Occlusion : True
Compress Lightmaps : False
Lighting Details :
Only one point light.
Intensity : 5000
Indirect Lighting Intensity : 1
All else is default (I haven’t touched it).
Please help me with this, I’ve been looking at tutorials and such for over a week now and it’s really killing me!!! I can provide more pictures if needed. Thanks in advance!
Are you using a static or a stationary light? Those shadows don’t look like distance field shadows, which makes me think you’re using the simpler static light.
@Adik - the problem is, the mesh is quite simplistic and small in comparison to let’s say the ceiling. If I increase all the lightmap resolutions, the game will get as heavy as rendering it in real-time… @jonimake Static lighting. No distance field shadowing too… How do you increase the quality from the light source? What settings do you use?
I’m not saying you should use a 1024x lightmap for you game, it is just to test if the light map resolution is the issue. And if your two plains or balks are huge than you have to use a huge lightmap for detailed shadows, if you are not willing in to use big lightmaps becasue of performnace / vram issues, than you have to go movable for you objects.
From what I’ve gathered, Stationary lights are the way to go. I can have many shadowless stationary lights, but are they going to severely cripple the performance? I’m looking at two methods here - Static lights with 2048 texture lightmaps, or stationary lights with 256 - 512 lightmaps. Which one will be more performance friendly?
A quick update. I increased the lightmap resolutions of my real level (the first pictures were just a test one), got all lighting to stationary, but the quality of the indirect shadows is terrible. You can see it in the top-right corner, right next to the wood with the canvases… Any ideas? (Lightmap resolution of the ceiling - 512)
If you have something moving going on in your scene than use Stationary lights, if your scene is absolutly static than you can also use just static lights.
If you are going for quality than you have to bake your light and your meshes have to be set to STATIC. You have to balance between the size of your lightmaps “vram use” and quality. Start with high or low lightmaps and than go higher/lower to get a good balance between quality and lightmap resolution. It’s a trade off, something for something… There is no answer like you have to do this and everything is going to look super nice. You need to optimize every scene different
There is no differnece between static and stationary lights except stationary lights will still allow to cast new shadows after building the light in you scene “for movable objects like charatcers”.
Two things here, One the size of your lightmap has no impact on your games performace but will effect the size of your game and the amount of memory it consumes. Two, You can use lots of Non-Shadowing stationaty lights with little impact on performance as UE4 uses a deferred render. However like with anything you need to check your performance offten to make sure that you are not using to many lights. Check out the following link to find out more on how to do performance profiling for your project.
