I am having a lighting build issues. Where everything I build the lighting for my character you can see the texture seams. I have absolutely no idea how to fix this as I messed with every variable in the lightmap resolution. I know characters don’t need lightmaps since they use dynamic lighting. But the seams are every present which makes the model look ugly. I included the uv layout and a screenshot of the problem. hopefully that helps to show my issue.
What specific lightmap resolution did you use for these screenshots? I wouldn’t be surprised if those seams showed up even with a resolution of 512px. Your UV map doesn’t lend itself too well to lightmapping, because your island borders are hardly aligned with the pixel grid. That can mess up lightmaps pretty quick.
Lightmap UV’s won’t affect it if you aren’t building lightmaps. The issue is likely a normals issue, make sure your normal map is set to normal map compression otherwise it won’t render correctly.
for the Uv layout I used 128 and I did it in Maya. I know for lightmapping this uv is terrible but arnt characters not supposed to use lightmaps? I changed around the normals and got better result. where is the normal map compression setting? when I import it into unreal?
Well, I was assuming you actually built static lighting on that character, using it as a static, non-movable mesh in your scene, and got those results. Otherwise it is probably as darthviper said. If your mesh is not static, then there won’t be any lightmaps used for shadowing except you specifically ticked the relevant box under Lightmass settings. I don’t think you did that.
You can find normal compression settings in the details pane of your texture. Double-click the texture in the content browser and look for the **Compression **category. There’s a drop down called “Compression Settings”, choose the one that says Normalmap. If that’s already the active setting, then at least the compression settings are correct. If you’re still having problems, it might be related to the normal map’s color channels, or it might be some bleeding in the normal map. But we would need to have a look at your normal map to figure that out.