Hello! I’ve made a tree which I’d like to use in my environment in UE4. The problem is that it’s pretty dense, with 23k triangles that are mostly due to putting a whole bunch of planes with branch-leaf-texture.
First I tried just generating the UVs within the UE4 import dialog. I checked that the lightmap index was set correctly. However, the lightmap just looked like it had many, MANY white dots on it. I imagine this is due to the density of my tree. Also, whenever I baked lighting, I always got an error telling me the tree had overlapping UVs. I also tried cranking the lightmap res up to 1024, with no luck.
Then I tried generating the UVs in Maya, and the lightmap ended up looking like this.
This works without errors, but I feel like I have to crank up the lightmap resolution for it to be lighted properly.
As far as I know, lightmaps shouldn’t have overlapping UVs. Is this how a lightmap for a very dense mesh should look like? Is the solution to just crank up the lightmap resolution? Is a lightmap resolution of 1024 or even 2048 really okay? Or should I just make a less complicated mesh? I just want some pointers on how to deal with huge/dense meshes and lightmaps. Thank you!