Guys, I have a serious problem with my shadows. This is how they should look like:
And this is how they look after I build the scene:
I work with 3ds max, and made a light map that looks like this:
I’ve been trying to figure out why the shadows have this problem, but with no result. Any help would be appreciated.
Increase the lightmap resolution to 1024. If that doesnt give you reasonably better looking shadows then you’ll have to split that mesh into a couple of pieces and repack the lightmap UV’s because it looks like quite a large mesh and it will need very high res. lightmaps as it is now.
I’ve increased it, and am building at the moment. I hope it works, because I’ve already broke down my mesh to small meshes, and I would rather not brake it down to even smaller. Do you happen to know if I could export multiple meshes in one fbx file and still have proper light maps when importing it into UE?
Also, from the lightmap it looks like you probably have too mean UV seams, limiting the number of seams will mean that you can utilize the space more and get better results.
It look far better now. There are minor errors, and the build time is a lot longer, but before the shadows were unbearable, now they look good. Thanks for your help. So I guess this is a good method for light maps, break down the meshes to smaller ones and increase the resolution if needed.
Some large shapes like walls and floors sometimes need to be split up so that you can use more lightmaps to get the detail you need
I split them up, but I have another problem. I have several floor meshes. And the point in 3d space where they touch each other looks like this:
Try to avoid building large flat surfaces from multiple meshes, indirect lighting gets smoothed and it probably won’t match up between them, so it’s better to have the floor as a single mesh.
It is a single mesh.
Make sure your vertices are welded and that the polygon is flat and has correct smoothing applied when exported to UE4.
There are no vertices to be welded, its plane, its flat and I’m almost sure it has correct smoothing.
I have to check the smoothing groups.
Yup. It has correct smoothing.
