Shadows disappears after build

Development Rendering
1

Hi!

I’ve recently completed my first project ever in UE4 (or atleast hit my minimal goal in the process) and whenever I build my lighting, pretty much every shadow disappears except for very few (who turns out to be very bad quality).
The map is somewhat large (it’s a flying city).
This was a project I started on about 1 week before the start of a preparatory course within game design and finished at home, the course was about 3-4 weeks long and everything was fine both when I started the project and when working with it at the school.
The lighting problem occured when I brought the project home, it was then that my lighting started hating me, and I haven’t even touched any settings.
I duplicated my work from version 4.9 to 4.11 and even 4.12 (preview 5), but nothing helps. I’ve tried googling the problem up but absolutely nothing helps my situation :confused:
I’ve tried both increasing and decreasing my lightmass resolution on my meshes and such but nothing helps. It either stays the same or the lightmass crashes during build after have been waiting for an entire day for the process to finish.
I’ve tried every possible way I can but nothing fixes this and I feel so helpless right now :frowning:
It is as I said, everything was fine till I brought it home and I haven’t touched any settings at all… till now of course, but even by doing so, nothing has fixed this.
The shadows is the only thing that is left before I want to publish my work to YouTube, but without the shadows, it just doesn’t look good.
My ram is at 16GB.
I’m so inexperienced and lost right now lol.
Here are some pictures, comparing the preview mode in editor and after building lighting.

http://s33.postimg.org/7q9mvan7z/Screen_Shot00002.png

http://s33.postimg.org/jv6tbvcpb/Screen_Shot00001.png

http://s33.postimg.org/asuk1sob3/Screen_Shot00001.png

http://s33.postimg.org/gib95hbf3/Screen_Shot00002.png

2

Your lightmap resolution is too small, which means that when you build the lighting the shadows are large and blurry.

4

What resolution do you suggest?
I’ve tried up to 128 ish, if I go higher it’s a very high risk that my engine crashes due to the lightmass

5

128 is not a high resolution, that’s only 128x128 pixels, you could go up to 2048x2048 if you really needed to but you need to keep it as low as you can. It all depends on the object, if it’s high detailed or it needs high detailed shadows then it needs a higher resolution.

However, if the map is very large, then it might be better to look into doing a dynamic lighting solution, it doesn’t look as nice but in some cases it’s the only option.

6

Poor Darthviper… how many time have you answered this question since the beginning? :stuck_out_tongue:

7

I think like a quarter of my posts are on this topic