Frayed shadows appear where they shouldn't

You can sport the problem just by looking at it. My meshes have this weird shadow edge that really shouldn’t be there. I rebuilt the UVs and tried to change the lightmap size. None of it worked very well. Has anyone encountered this and knows how to fix it?

Can you show us the lightmap UV’s of those meshes please?

Here they are. They’re generated by the Unreal Editor.

Hi Trumo,

Jacky is absolutely right on this one. You’ll need to reorganize you’re lightmaps to get a some crisp lightmaps. One of my favorite resources for lightmapping is WorldofLevelDesign.com. There are some great tutorials and walk-throughs available on this site outside of this tutorial! :slight_smile:

Thank you!

Tim

They are not overlapping, but they are messy for lightmaps. You’ll need to get the edges parallel to the grid so that you dont get such jagged shadow bleeding on the edges. And you should use your modeling software instead of the editor’s UV generator.

Also, i noticed that you imported the whole flat of an apartment as a single mesh? If so i suggest splitting it into 2-3 pieces and then UV map again for better lightmap resolution.

I did not import it as a single mesh. What you see are the separate walls. Because of how picky the static lighting baking is generating a separate UV on channel 1 for lightmapping is the only choice.

Thanks for the link. What exactly is going on here? Texturing works well. There isn’t supposed to even be a shadow there. How is it getting generated? Is this a bug?

I already told you why it is happening, the edges need to be parallel to the grid. Lightmaps are baked as pixels, rectangular shapes, so when the edge isnt snapped to the grid you see shadow bleeding problems like that.

Lightmaps are baked as pixels, rectangular shapes, so when the edge isnt snapped to the grid you see shadow bleeding problems like that.

That’s the explanation. Thanks!

Hi Trumo,

The documentation I have provided and plus the advice Jacky has given will be the solution you are seeking. Lightmaps have to be setup a specific was to get the results you are looking for.

Alternatively you could Dynamic lighting and avoid lightmaps altogether but this will be a bigger performance hit as you begin built your level and game world.

Thank you!

Tim

Thanks for the advice. Would switching to dynamic just require switching the object type to “moveable”?