# Shadows round out and look bad when building lighting.

**URL:** <https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/shadows-round-out-and-look-bad-when-building-lighting/340733>\
**Category:** Rendering\
**Tags:** Shadows, build, unreal-engine, Lighting, question\
**Created:** [December 7, 2015, 8:29am UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/shadows-round-out-and-look-bad-when-building-lighting/340733 "2015-12-07T08:29:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![anonymous\_user\_576464da1](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/2/8/5/28502927f1d97ba1051b3b47ccfe17233bf41ef0.png) [@anonymous\_user\_576464da1](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/anonymous_user_576464da1)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2015, 8:29am UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/shadows-round-out-and-look-bad-when-building-lighting/340733/1 "2015-12-07T08:29:09Z")

</div>

Hi, I’ve been learning Unreal 4 recently. But I ran into a problem with lighting. I have an outdoor scene that has a directional light and a few point lights to add ambient light to surfaces the directional light doesn’t hit. The problem is the shadows look perfectly fine when the lighting isn’t built. But the shadows suddenly blob together and round out when I build the lighting. I tried turning up the lightmap resolution of some of the objects. Tried making the directional light static which just made the shadows and lighting look terrible and tried using area shadows instead which also looked bad. Here are screenshots of what the lighting looks like before and after building lighting.

 ![69579-highresscreenshot00023.png](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/d/4/c/d4c75f1cc6d52a31fccac2a1fb00d8e033d1eaf9.png)

 ![69580-highresscreenshot00022.png](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/3/9/7/397c64ba89b09c14b26fce15f6b49f459a46584e.png)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![anonymous\_user\_2ed5b4c7](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/2/8/5/28502927f1d97ba1051b3b47ccfe17233bf41ef0.png) [@anonymous\_user\_2ed5b4c7](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/anonymous_user_2ed5b4c7)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2015, 9:43am UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/shadows-round-out-and-look-bad-when-building-lighting/340733/2 "2015-12-07T09:43:24Z")

</div>

Hi!

I think you need increase lightmap resolution for objects which receive shadows. Before built lightmap, you see dynamic shadows. Dynamic shadows are not used the lightmap resolution parameter.

> **[A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/a-new-community-hosted-unreal-engine-wiki/141494)**
>
> After over a year in maintenance mode, the official Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline. These resources now live on a new community-run Unreal Engine Community Wiki — https://unrealcommunity.wiki/! You will be able to find content from...

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![anonymous\_user\_576464da1](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/2/8/5/28502927f1d97ba1051b3b47ccfe17233bf41ef0.png) [@anonymous\_user\_576464da1](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/anonymous_user_576464da1)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2015, 11:44pm UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/shadows-round-out-and-look-bad-when-building-lighting/340733/3 "2015-12-07T23:44:12Z")

</div>

The lightmap resolution for the objects are 2048 and it still didn’t help.I turnd my light to moveable and it looks better. but still doesn’t look great.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kurylo3d](https://d1ap1mz92jnks1.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/forums.unrealengine.com/kurylo3d/32/1150889_2.png) [@kurylo3d](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/kurylo3d)\
**Post date:** [April 26, 2016, 1:53pm UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/shadows-round-out-and-look-bad-when-building-lighting/340733/4 "2016-04-26T13:53:55Z")

</div>

Check your lightmap uvs then. Maybe the uv space is just tiny for that object…