Shadows

I created a garage door, but I don’t know whats wrong with my shadows. the bottom of the door seams to have shadows on it. I have a texture channel and a light map channel. I have pictures so can anyone tell me what Im doing wrong

Hello seangunn,

There a few things you can do in order to troubleshoot what is causing the black artifacts at the bottom of your garage door.

1.) When you build your lighting is your lighting quality set to production?
2.) From your images I see that the static mesh’s light map resolution is set to 64. Try setting this to something like 256 or 512.
3.) Your light maps are quite far apart. This causes issues with the calculation when building your light mass. UE4.
4.) Do you have a light mass importance volume in your scene? If you don’t please add one and make sure all of your mesh’s are inside of the volume.

I am linking you to our UV mapping for light maps. After looking through this and following these troubleshoots please let me know if they worked.

thank you for helping me out. I increased the resolution, added a light mass importance volume and I enlarged my light maps, but I see a piece of light on my static mesh which shouldn’t be there

I am glad the majority of your issues have been cleared. There are a few things that this could be. If the roof was modeled as a separate object and then imported as one .fbx then this issue can happen. We recommend using solid geometry as to avoid light leaking. If this is not the case you can try adjusting the Indirect Lighting Quality within your World Settings.

I will be linking you to a lighting troubleshooting guide. Around 3/4 down the page there is a section dedicated to light bounces and indirect illumination. This should hep clear up the issue. If it does not if you would provide a copy of that particular .fbx I can take a closer look at it’s properties.

Im still having a problem with the shadows. Maybe its the way I built my project. I have pictures on how I created this. And again thanks for taking the time to help me out

Ok, so it looks like this is a solid piece of geometry. Sometimes creating multiple pieces, even when making these pieces flush, can cause light leaking issues.

If you add a material to this mesh that is not the standard checkerboard material does the light go away? Would you be willing to provide a copy of the .fbx so that I can take a closer look at it?

NOTE: In the future. You can use the buttons (ALT + Print Screen) to capture an image. From there you can open an image manipulation program, like paint, and press (CTRL + V) to Paste your image. Then you can save and post here. This way you can avoid taking pictures of your computer :).

Ive added a material to the mesh but I still see the light leaking in some spots. I don’t know how do I send you a copy of the fbx, but can you let me know how to do it. And thanks for the info on how to capture the image from the computer. I learn something new everyday

Certainly, so you can attach this in a program called dropbox. This is a file storing software, that is free up to a certain amount of information, that you can upload your .fbx to. From there you can click on the name of your .fbx and it will bring up another screen. You can link me the URL ( Web Address ) from that web page. I will then download your .fbx and try and determine what is causing that light to still appear underneath the roof of your garage.

I’ve downloaded dropbox and followed its instructions and ive uploaded it. Am I suppose to add you on dropbox?

On the web page that you have the .fbx loaded, copy the http…etc at the top of the window. You can click within that box and you should see that information highlighted in blue. Press Ctrl + C to copy and Ctrl + V to past that within the comment box.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e90zg8zlldcazf4/Garage.fbx?dl=0

hopefully I did this right

I brought your .fbx into a test blank project and assigned the DefaultMaterial to it. Then I went to the toolbar in my viewport and went to the little arrow next to build. This drops down to options that you can set when you build your lighting. In this dropdown there is a tab labeled lighting quality. I set this to production. I then went to the .fbx itself and changed it’s Min Lightmap Resolution and Light map resolution to 1024 and clicked applied changes. I then built my scene.

I was unable to reproduce that light leaking that you posted.

What are your systems specs? What version of Windows are you on? What is your graphics card? Do you know what version of DirectX you are using? You can find all of this by going to the Start ( Windows Icon ) in the bottom left corner of your computer screen. From there, in the search bar, type in DxDiag. Select the .exe that appears after typing this in. This will bring up a window with all of your systems spec’s. In this window chose the " Save All Information " option. This will bring up a window to save this information in a .txt format. When you comment here there will be a little paper clip icon. That is the option to attach a file to the comment. Find where you saved the .txt and select it to attach that file here.

link text

Have you upgraded to the latest driver for your graphics card. I know the Intel’s can be a little funny about it. You will have to go to their website and update it from there. It says you last updated on February the 20th. There may be a later version of that driver.

These are my spec’s :

OS Windows 7 Professional

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU ES-2620 0 @ 2.00 GHz 2.00GHz

32GB Ram

GeForce GTX 770
Version 347.09

For something this simple though I would tend to think that your spec’s are well within reasonable development parameters.

I went to NVidias website but I didn’t see anything about updates. Is there any possible way I can fix the shadows on my mesh, because I also plan on using real time movement. And what I mean by that is I want to have a day and night cycle

I believe this may be what you are looking for.