so i haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on. i’ve been working on this scene on and off for more than 2 weeks. as of yesterday - lightmass resolution seems to come and go at its own will. in some cases - if i zoom close - it’ll clean up - other times - no changes at all!
is it the amount of geomtry added to the scene - lightmass comp times? just asking - because my scene has been building up in that regard. also - this is an arch-viz scene (i’m only stating that because i normally work with lo-poly baked assets where this hasn’t been an issue)
my lightmass settings are below. i’ve been bumping up my lightmass resolution on various assets - but it seems to not make any difference. is it something i’m missing in lightmass settings?
your input is greatly appreciated - i’ll pulling my hair out!! :mad: i started this project in 4.10 - then moved it over to the latest build 4.11 - no improvement…
thanks @James_Gallagher & for the feedback. i’m really needing to resolve this - so your input is appreciated.
so first - the door and closet doors share the same uv map. the default resolution is 64 of course - but i’m using the override @ 512. (should i making this setting per mesh? or is the override legit?) below are the uv’s - rather than using steamroller script via 3ds max - i manually flattened them myself for both channels (so they’re identical)
i should add (not sure if it matters but… it lists channels 0 and 1 - should it be 1 & 2?
also - i initially exported the bedroom unit altogether - however, not all objects were exported from 0,0 coordinates obviously - does this matter?
and all my meshes are set to static, fyi - which i believe is the default anyways…
Your UV’s are really bad, using an automatic method will cause issues because things like the rounded corners will get split into tiny sections which won’t show up in the lightmap because they’re smaller than a pixel. To get better results you would need to do them by hand, which would allow you to put the UV seams in a way so that the small polygons will be attached to the larger polygons which will give better lighting.
I’m surely not a pro but I’m not understanding why in the map there are so many tiny meshes neither why some rectangular meshes (which they should be very simple and just divided in 2 triangular pieces) are made by so many triangles: am I missing something about your geometry?
Surely uncheck the “compress Lightmaps” in World Setting -> Lightmass Settings (way better quality even if slower on build lights)
If you want to make “empiric” trials you could set the lightmap scale inside the setting of the static mesh and not override it, export/impor a single door (and without handle), and personally I’d add a simple collision box directly in unreal
I know these are 2cents suggestions but as I was saying I’m not a pro and I’m still Learning!
sorry for the latency on my end - deadline was intense!
so yes @darthviper107 - uv’s are are mess. there was some serious cleanup. and thanks @anonymous_user_2848b0c6 - unchecked ‘compress lightmaps’ - made improvement.
a big thanks to for taking the time to examine my scene and provide critique. i made several changes per his suggestions and it vastly cleaned up my scene. they are as follows:
my walls were a single mesh and had a resolution of 512 - ha, what the hell was i thinking anyways - split the walls into several pieces, updated both uv channels - and assigned 512 per mesh. the floor and ceiling were also singular meshes - which i decided to keep (as a single plane) but upped the lightmap res to 1024 each.
the finishing touch was an article by ue4arch - i followed this and it made all the difference. highly recommended!
i have to say - arch viz rules sure are different from creating game assets and environments (especially in the case of editing the baselightmass - which i’ve never needed to do prior to arch-viz work)
thanks again to everyone in the unreal community - you folks rock!
I think for archviz, if you are only doing renders then it’s worth the time to build the Nvidia VXGI source so that you can use dynamic global illumination–the quality isn’t necessarily as good as baked lighting, but it can be pretty great and you can turn it up enough to get better quality and it won’t matter if it takes a second to render a frame because it’s still much faster than building static lights.
anyways - split the walls into several pieces, updated both uv channels - and assigned 512 per mesh. the floor and ceiling were also singular meshes - which i decided to keep (as a single plane) but upped the lightmap res to 1024 each.
