I’ve been testing out several lighting settings to understand how it works. Most of those tests give me these artifacts and I can’t figure out why.
In this case, I didn’t touch the BaseLightmass.ini settings, I’m using production quality, and the settings shown in the picture, including production quality, 100 bounces, and indirect quality at 10.
The static meshes are “cubes”, very simple, with proper UV unwrap and generated lightmaps, with a 1024 resolution.
I started with UE4 not long ago, and I’m not yet familiar with many aspects of the engine. If you need more information, please let me know.
Just to make sure, I would create my own lightmaps, and see how they perform. Auto generated ones can provide poor results. Make sure you uncheck ‘Auto Generate Lightmaps’ when you import your model to the engine.
First disable ambient occlusion in world settings. Then split the room into separate walls. I’m assuming when you say cube it is the whole room and with 1024 lightmap res. which is too low for such a large mesh. Use 512 lightmap res. for each wall and rebuild the lights. If you continue seeing some smearing or gradient looking artifacts disable compressed lightmaps in world settings and build again.
You may also want to decrease indirect lighting smoothness to around 0.6 if you continue using quality 10.
I’m sorry for the misunderstsanding for both, I already tested my own lightmaps, same result. The walls are separate meshes, I just wasn’t clear enough. For the other suggestions I’ll test and report back asap.
Alright, so, I turned off Ambient Occlusion and used smooth at 0.6 and I got rid of the artifacts near the couch and some others in the white wall. Then I didn’t compress the lightmaps, same, it got a little better, but right now UE4 is taxing my ram a lot (taking around 14GB, is this expected? I thought it would tax HD space, and ram not this bad).
Thank you for the suggestion, I will explore more of the AO and smoothing settings for now, I don’t think not compressing the lightmaps is a good option.
Thanks a lot! Besides that, what else could I look into to understand this problem?
RAM usage is expected to be high while building the lights but not afterwards. Btw, you may not want to disable lightmap compression if you are making a game unless those stains are really bothering you. It should be ok for other kind of applications(arch-viz, animation, etc.) though.
You can also experiemtn with lower static lighting level scale values(values less than 1) in World Settings to improve the quality.
It’s actually for ArchViz, so I guess I could live with it, the final package size should be “small”.
I read something here about using the scale. The tests I did with scale were not conclusive, I didn’t see any improvements, the building times just got higher (trying to solve the stains, not overall quality).
