Terrible lighting quality (4.10.4)

Heya,
I’m working on a scene and I suddenly noticed that the lighting quality has dropped significantly, even when building at Production quality.
I have started out from the “Lighting Quick Start” tutorial and the quality was great. Only after continuing my work, adding quite a few lights, I noticed the drop.
I tried checking my Engine Scalability settings, tried removing and adding lights and checking the answerhub for similar questions (none of the answers I found helped).

If I try moving the lights, their quality gets significantly improved. But when I build the lights again, they lose quality.
I’ve attached a couple of screenshots. The 2nd screenshot is the light I made following the tutorial (it was OK then).

https://puu.sh/nBsMC/bef1853cd7.jpg

https://puu.sh/nBsV1/7ed440aca8.jpg

Thanks in advance for your help!

A couple things I’d look at, whats the lightmap resolution for those static meshes (like the walls next to the lights), what setting for lighting are you building with, and have you tried tweaking the lightmass settings for the level? Also, have you added a lightmass importance volume?

The last thing to look at would be the UV for the static mesh itself. If its not properly UV’d (or does not take up a decent enough texture space) you are going to continue to get lower resolution lighting. That could be why the other project looked better - the UV’s were packed and done correctly.

If you are using BSP however, can you try selecting it and then in the details panel setting the lightmap resolution to something low (like 2)?

whats the lightmap resolution for those static meshes (like the walls next to the lights)
At the time of taking the screenshots - 32. Messing around with that setting seems to help (I.E increasing it to 128 or more). The thing is, I have another, different project, where I didn’t mess with this setting at all, and the lighting is fine. Is there something else at play here?

what setting for lighting are you building with
Preview, but switching to other settings including Production doesn’t help much.

have you tried tweaking the lightmass settings for the level?
Doesn’t seem to work.

have you added a lightmass importance volume?
Yes. When I took these screenshots it was a little out of position. I have fixed that, but I still have the same issue.

Thanks!

I should’ve probably mentioned it, sorry: in both cases (this and the previous project), I’m only using the starter content included with the engine for the purpose of study. I didn’t touch any of the UVs in the stater content - I had no reason to.

Here you go:

http://puu.sh/nBvMC/eb08400cb3.png

I didn’t mess with any light settings that I don’t know of. So I only played with the settings in the basic “light” section (the ones that aren’t hidden) and the “Light Profiles” section in some lights (simply using one of the engine’s built in IES textures)

Interesting - would you mind posting an image of the lightmass section from the World Settings panel? Also, are you messing with any specific settings with the lights themselves?

It really looks like a lightmap resolution issue - try increasing to few hundreds, definitely above 32 if it is what you have used.
I believe that it is normal that you notice a better lighting when you just add a light before building your lightmaps. It seems Unreal use dynamic shadows as preview in the viewport, until you build your lightmap where they get replaced by actual baked lightmaps.

I had the same kind of problem, I got crazy finding some solution everywhere and finally I discovered it was cause the image visualization mode of my laptop had changed somehow to Cinema. I felt so stupid but it solved the problem.