Hi! I’m figuring out how to properly bake light in ue4. And right now I stumbled upon a bit of an issue.
I have this small scene with nothing (so far) else than walls, a door and a window. Everything has custom made lightmaps.
After building light in ue4, I’m getting artifacts all over the place.
As you can see here, there are dark spots on the door, and light bleeding on the wall.
I’ve watched a recording of UE dev stream where they were talking about lightmaps. And they were using even smaller lightmap density than I do (they had everything in blue tones). Yet, my results are much worse than the developers had on stream, somehow.
I tried to separate the window mesh into several pieces - frame, flap, glass and sliding lock. UV’d lightmaps for each of the pieces separately. Imported them individually into the engine. Combined together into blueprint. Build the lighting… and it still happens!
Could you show us your lightmap uvs please?
I’m guessing that your lightmap resolution is low (you can see the distorted shadows on the wall) you have cuts in your lightmap uvs where you shouldn’t have and your edges are not snapped to pixel/grid!
Yes, the resolution is low, but it is optimal if you look in Lightmap Density mode. Lightmaps were not the issue, as it turned out. I will post the solution in a separate comment, so I could mark it as an answer for people, who might stumble upon the same issue.
However, I’m still having some troubles, and if you could maybe take a look at it, that’ll be great! I’ll post it in the next comment as well.
Ok, so, I’ve spent an entire day googling, studying documentations and watching Unreal Engine dev streams recordings.
And here’s the rundown of what I found.
The important settings, that rarely being mentioned or explained well, can be found in World Settings tab.
Static Lighting Level Scale, Indirect Lighting Quality and Indirect Lighting Smoothness.
The best way to learn how to properly set them up is to [watch this video I found][1]. This is the most helpful thing ever!
HOWEVER! Now that my static lighting is all fine and dandy, I’m having another issue, and can’t seem to find solution anywhere. Only couple mentions on forums, but that’s about it. Here’s what I mean:
As you can see, my movable objects are MUCH brighter than static ones. I’ve covered up the bottom of the scene, so no light should be bleeding in. All walls are covered up as well. Volume Light Sample Placement Scale is set to 0.5 with Static Lighting Level Scale of 0.1 (as you can see on the screnshot, it is pretty dense). Sky light intensity is 1.
I’ve tried to tweak things this way and that way… But can’t seem to figure out why all the movables are glowing so much? And yeah, they are using the same material as static meshes they “attached” to.
In my case, it was actually the opposite of how I was trying to solve it. I was attempting to increase the Volume Light Sample Placement Scale in hopes that it will help. As you can see on the previous screenshot, the amount of samples is way too high. And it seems like it makes the engine confused.
I reduced the amount of samples until all objects were lit more or less correctly. For my scene with Static Lighting Level Scale of 0.1, the Volume Light Sample Placement Scale is set to 1.5 on this screenshot:
