Issues with static lighting and misplaced shadow

I swear, lighting will be the death of me. I’ve got my model set up and have switched to static lighting to make for higher quality and faster renders for when I export to video. After futzing with a bunch of options and methods, including creating lightmap UVs for my geometry that didn’t previously exist and adjusting their resolutions so that they actually displayed shadows and textures instead of weird blocky artifacts. I’m still not quite there, though, and could use some help.

Right now, the shadows are mostly a proper resolution, but seem to be misplaced. I have a global light source, amplified by a skylight, and a lightmassportal at the window, as well as a lightmassimportancevolume applied to the area that the camera will go through. The sconces and recessed lights are simply emissive textures and do not contribute to the lighting of the area. Any ideas on how to fix the shadows, or - since I’m rendering a video anyways - should I just dispense with the static lighting and change the lights to movable?

Potentially related: changing the view to Lightmap Density is a sea of red, but adjusting the Lightmap Resolution for a mesh doesn’t seem to change this, even when I reduce the resolution to the smallest power of 2 that will still generate a light map UV for the mesh.

Hi!

Could you show us your lighmass settings please?
…you have really big surfaces: are those modular pieces (like your floor) or one mesh?

Here you go. None of the pieces in the scene are modular; everything is set to static as the only thing that will be moving is the camera for the purposes of creating a pre-rendered fly through.

These settings look good to me (well they don’t cause the problem)!
Do you have any error messages by any chance streaming pool being too low?
Or still could be lightmaps being too low… your objects are “floating”…
Could you show one of the pillars’ lightmap please and what resolution lightmap it has?

I never saw any errors pop up, or at least nothing significant once I worked with the lightmap UVs as best as I was able. I’ll see if I can revive an autosave to try and get the lightmaps back as I’ve had to push forward with the project and just work with movable lighting, and somewhere in that process the lightmaps got torched. I’ve attached the settings and UV map, though. I still wanna figure out this problem, so how do I load one of my older auto-saves to try and get that all back?

Oh, also ignore the “floating”. They’re on the ground, but there’s also a 2D ngon hovering an inch off the floor to demarcate an area that will be used to set up prop pieces, and it cuts through that bottom inch or so of the columns.

I meant the “floating” as whenever I’ve seen that it was because of low res lightmaps…
The lightmap… I can’t “translate” it for sure but… are you sure you don’t have overlapping/duplicated faces? Just the top row: you have 8 sides… also maybe 2 tops and 2 bottoms…??
I’m sorry but I don’t know how to recover an old autosave! :S

Just an idea to speed up things: if you could upload your scene somewhere I could take a look…

I can’t say definitively that there are no overlaps; that UV map was created by Unreal, so I would think it would avoid making any overlaps, but I don’t know for sure. All of the model pieces were originally created in SketchUp, which has pretty poor UV tools, so it’s probable something got messed up. Here’s a Dropbox link to a zipped archive of the project. It’s a hefty 619MB, and on my hard drive the uncompressed project is 32GB, so be prepared for that much data:

Sorry I meant your mesh and not the uv… from the uv I assume that your mesh has overlapping faces because there are too many (x2) faces in the lightmap uv as it should…
Sorry the link didn’t show up properly! :S…could you send/post it again please? I’ll download it as soon as possible and will have some free time in the evening! :wink:

No worries it’s all good! :slight_smile:
…the file is still uploading, I’ll try again later! :wink:

Oh wait a sec! :smiley:
…can you check your save directory’s size? /just if it’s a problem for you to upload such a huge file… you can delete/exclude that/

Sure, here’s the link again, though I miscalculated: the zipped file is a whopping 29GB, so I get it if that’s too much to deal with. Dropbox - File Deleted

Oh dear god, I went through the project folders and realized I’d left in both some downloaded assets that I was gonna experiment with, as well as an entire image sequence and compiled - but not compressed - fly through video. I’ve created a copy that’s a MUCH MUCH slimmer 600MB file. Once it finishes uploading to Dropbox I’ll post the link to it.

:smiley: I was refreshing it from time to time but it always said it’s still uploading… :S
…waiting for the link! :wink:

Here, this one should be ready to go (and much easier on your data plan): Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life

Hi!

Ok, I had some time now…
Your scene is not going to work like this! You have to break up all your walls into smaller pieces!! And your floor+ceiling too!
Even if you’d set a 4096 res lightmap to your wall mesh a single wall surface would get only a few pixels of lighting information!