I’m facing a strange issue with baked lighting after upgrading my project from 5.4.4 to 5.6.1.
When working with either CPU or GPU Lightmass (doesn’t matter which), if the light’s mobility is set to static, the whole scene is looking really strange. However when using stationary lights, the lighting bakes correctly and looks great.
I’ve included screenshots, where the second image of of each diplay mode is the one with the broken static lights. It’s most noticeable in the Detail Lighting mode.
When I create a new project and use the same geometry from my level, static lights work perfectly fine… I also tried to recreate my materials in my old project, but that has no effect either. So it appears its not the geometry or the materials causing this. Even crazier is that I have one level which I made in 5.4 where static lights work perfectly, even now after upgrading. But in all newly created levels static lights don’t work.
Unfortunately I’m at my wits end, I really need the static fill lights, because stationary lights have this overlapping limitation. Is there anything I could do to get static lights back?
Dunno about the billboard, kinda looks like the artifacts you get in low lighting with GPULM when using the denoiser. You can try disabling the denoiser and baking.
With regard to the missing specular try resetting the viewport to defaults
Keep in mind, static lights have no direct specular response, which is why stationary will always look better. Their indirect specular only comes from reflection captures so any surface without reflection capture coverage (or SSR) will have no specular.
You can check if you have sufficient coverage by looking at the reflection viewmode.
I tried your suggestions but unfortunately they didn’t produce the desired result.
Disabling the denoiser creates artifacts, which only get removed when massively cranking up the lightmap resolutions and renderer quality. I am aiming for an “Outlast” look, so the lightmaps can’t be too highres, it’s not supposed to look super smooth, but rather dirty and grimy, just like the lightmaps in the first Outlast game. The weird artifacts in the detailed lighting viewmode however are not supposed to be there.
Then I tried your suggestion of resetting the viewport, which didn’t change anything.
I also checked the reflections viewmode and since I’m using quite a few reflection captures, I don’t think it’s the reflections who are at fault. I’ve included some new screenshots.
I also tried to replace my current projects config files with that of a new, fine working one, but that didn’t help either. Is there anything else I could try?
Are you using the GPULM that ships with the editor? Because Epic has abandoned that and it has not been updated in years, becoming increasingly more and more broken with every release.
The discoloration seems to be gone when you disable the denoiser which tells me that is most likely the cause, if that’s the case, using the version of GPULM in that link may help.
As for the loss of specular, I dont know. Like I mentioned earlier some loss of specular detail is inevitable because static lights don’t have any direct specular, without a static bake comparison between 5.4/5.6 it’s hard to know if anything is even wrong.
Yes I am using the GPULM by Yujiang Wang, I am even using his fancy GPU denoiser which denoises lightmaps so fast, that the bake for this scene hardly takes 2 seconds in total.
It appears that I’ve had a misconception about static lights, the floor in this scene does have quite a lot of contrast and it looked really bad without any specular contributions from a light source. I misunderstood this as a bug, when in reality it’s just this particular material. In my other level where I have several static fill lights, I couldn’t see it, because the material there is a simple plywood with a very generic and not-so-contrasty roughness map, unlike the floor here.
So static lights could potentially look really bad when used on a material with a highly defined roughness map? At least that’s what I make of it. Just to end this thread with a learning point.
Also thanks for the sanity check, @Arkiras I’m very relieved. Also thanks for helping me out.
I’ve also adjusted the thread title to properly reflect what’s really going on.
In your case, when using stationary lights, direct shadows are produced by VSM which is very sharp (unless you disable it manually). When switched to static lights you need to increase lightmap res as now shadows are fully baked into lightmaps and limited by lightmap res. So if you have a plane/board right in front of the wall the shadows around its edges there would be artifacts.
Meanwhile, it seems like the lights hanging on the ceiling are not getting into the reflection captures - you should see very bright spots in your reflection view. The noise can be removed by disabling Use Emissive for Static Lighting on your emissive light meshes as they aren’t really lighting your scene
