I’m quoting Hobson (Unreal Engine Support) : ''If you have a specific need to have your LMs set up a certain way it’s probably best to manually create those. It’s good to remember that the LM is being generated based off the UV islands of the texture UV. So the layout will be organized based on those UV islands. ‘’
You see, this is my problem currently. It’s not the lightmap itself, it’s the texture uv. Because the auto lightmap is based on the texture uv, so you gotta have a good one to start with. For arch viz, we cannot use low poly models, it looks bad. Let’s say I have a 12 story building, with many many parts. Should I unwrap every part individually? Gonna take forever and cannot use flatten mapping cause there will be a million little parts. Can you unwrap all at once? gonna be even worse. How can we possibly do that? I’m talking about buildings have 300-400k polygons, if not more. If there are too many islands, the UV LM is going to end up with bad shadows. I also have furniture with 80k polygons, turbosmooth, etc. many small parts like screws, etc. Pain in the *** to unwrap, litterally. I could use ‘‘game’’ assets, but they will never look realistic enough imo.
We’ve only seen quite simple geometry so far in arch viz projects. It’s mostly small interiors with some (sometimes complex, I guess) furniture.
If we had a solid dynamic G.I solution, my god, it would be nice!!! Still gonna keep an eye open for this plug-in.
I’m not sure if we can sacrifice alot of visual fidelity for some interactivity. Sure, interactivity is cool, but do you think there are many potential clients for this?