Couple of thing have changed, not the materials though… I think it’s really awesome in Unreal!!
The most important is that I know I have to keep in mind the lightmaps!!
Also the way I have my main walls: not to overlap anything but corner snapped to have nice and clean corners!
Also to avoid as much as possible one sided meshes! …sometimes they do work fine with double sided materials but mostly with smaller objects… for walls or thicker meshes NEVER!!
That scene wasn’t mine!! I got it, “just” had to make it Unreal ready! …I think the carpet is made out of stripes and not hair…
I think for that image I’ve used Luoshuang’s GPULightmass and it took like 20 mins to render!! …I had other screenshots that looked the same, rendered with the default CPU renderer but took a LOT longer! /like 10 times longer!!/
Sure shoot your questions, I will try my best to solve/answer them!
Very interesting that you say, avoid one side meshes. I always assumed, what you don’t see, don’t make it.
So why should I make both sides for example the wall?
Those render times are crazy, I really do something wrong there. Do you know by any change the objects have alot polygons?
I don’t know the “science” how lightmass works but this is how it does: it needs to have thickness of walls/objects to “know” where can light pass through and were not… you’ll see light bleeds or just bright side of objects out of nowhere when using one sided objects…
No, most of the objects were low poly in both scenes… but there were a “couple” of them!
I don’t see the reason: if I’m right Vray can still only render SINGLE FRAMES (!!! :S) in Unreal, which is a shame in my opinion!
Vray: the GOD of G.I. came out with that embarrassing solution… :S Really sad…
…these scenes are fully baked!!! …“VR ready”…
VRay and all other 3ds max renderers send out rays from the cameras view and then calculate how it looks. It’s a reverse of reality where the light comes from light sources and ends up in your eyes. For these renderers it is true: what you don’t see doesn’t matter.
Unreal and all(?) game engines have to use a different approach called rasterization. There are light probes for dynamic lighting in the scene and the rest of the lighting is baked into the objects to speed up the render process. But here what you do not see does matter. The renderer doesn’t know were the camera will be after the bake so everything has to be considered.
One sided polygons are faster to render but will let the light through from their invisible side. So you need a few extra polygons where it matters, like the outside of a wall when the lighting is different on both sides of the wall.
About your long render times: You can check what assets take up the most time to bake AFTER you build the lighting. Go to the Build tab and select ‘Lighting Info -> Lighting StaticMesh Info’. There is a lot information there. There are a few things that take time to bake: Lots of polygons, large objects with lots of actors casting shadows on them, excessive light map sizes, foliage are usually the offenders.
…I had other screenshots that looked the same, rendered with the default CPU renderer but took a LOT longer! /like 10 times longer!!/