Me and my friend are diving into UE4 together with me as the technical person, and her as the artist. When placing down trees in our level, we run into a problem (both using UE 4.10.4). We have done maybe 6 hours of online research with no useful results thus far.
This problem occurs only with the trees in the level, and only first appeared once a few thousand faces worth of meshes had been placed. They all look and work very similarly, so I’m showing the one that claims to have 88.0% overlapping.
This blob of a shadow does not change when I increase the Lightmap Minimum Resolution, change skylights or directional lights to Static or Stationary, or change any other seemingly related setting.
This is the UV layout for the tree’s texture. All of the sets of leaves are stacked on top of each other.
This is UE4’s auto-generated lightmap UV, which, as disproportional as it looks, has no overlapping.
- Upon seeing “overlapping,” I thought it must be the texture UV that was the problem, but it seemed counter-intuitive in terms of quality, size, and effort. Bushes currently in the same level with similar UV layouts also experience no errors
- One thing I thought may be a problem was that the trees’ materials are set as “Double-sided Foliage.” I don’t know how this would interfere, but my first instinct upon making this tree was to make the body and the leaves separate. The only other things with that setting are bushes, which are unconnected clusters of 2-d faces.
- While doing research online, we both found many people saying “never use the auto-generated lightmap UVs,” for a reason we don’t know.
- We also found people saying you could use dynamic shadows if baked shadows weren’t working. Being relatively new to UE4, I tried making the tree Movable, but that just removed all shadows from it and the ground entirely.
Any feedback would be appreciated. I want to make rearranging the UV layout or making my own lightmap a last resort, but I would be willing to do so if that is the only known way of fixing this.
