Help and tips for lighting large meshes.

So I’m trying to create a level and having some serious trouble with my lighting. I’m having lots of light bleeding in through the seams and things like that. Since I started I’ve cut the mesh into 3 smaller, but still large meshes, and I’ve increased the light map resolutions of all of them to 1024. I also have 0 overlapping UV (lots of fun), and Cast Inset Shadow and Cast Shadow as Two sided are both on. Should I continue to cut this thing into smaller pieces until it looks right or is something else wrong? Should I manually make light map UVs rather then letting UE4 generate them from the texture UVs that I manually made?

I also used to have a skylight in here but that made the bleeding a lot worse, don’t know if that was a skylight issue or just a more light coming through the bleeds issue.

An example of what is going on - bleeding a lot better than when I started. Also notice the totally black object on the left. I just noticed that and don’t know what’s causing that.

Here are the UVs and light map UVs for the three parts of the level.

Also any general tips would be appreciated, I’m still learning.

Hello masterwigglestin,

The main point of concern for you from the images provided would be your unwraps. In the first image with the spiral like mesh, your UVs are only taking up about half of the 0 to 1 UV space. Whenever you unwrap a mesh you always want to make sure your are occupying as much of your UV space as possible. You also want to correct scale ratios for your polygons as well as evenly spaced padding.

Your best bet would be to have a read over the unwrapping documentation for static meshes. There is an example of a complex bridge mesh which I think you will find helpful!

Unwrapping UVs for Lightmaps

If you still have some questions or need a bit more advice please let us know.

Cheers,