I’m not new to UE4, but for the first time I faced a problem - black wide stripes on the site where the objects touch each other. I would like to get neat shadows of course.
At first sight, it seems that this is ambient occlusion, but I don’t use it in Post Process Volume and there are the default settings in the project settings.
I thought that LightMapResolution could be the cause of these stripes, but if you can see light map resolution of the wall is too huge - 2048 (small checker).
I use high settings, because it’s very important to get good shadows from indirect lighting too: Static Lighting Level Scale 0.1; Num Indirect Lighting Bounces 10; Num Sky Lighting Bounces 12; Indirect Lighting quality 10; Indirect Smoothness 1; Environment Intensity 0 (I use HDRI).
Tell me, please, how it is possible to correct the situation.
Share your experience!
Well it’s a well known “bug” in Unreal… it’s not a bug but the way how lightmaps work with the default lightmass solution… Basically whenever you get those “artifacts” it means that edges/corners don’t match up with the other lightmap resolution and Unreal has to come up with an “inbetween” result!
There are a few things you can do: not to use overlapping faces!! Your wall pieces/skirting should not overlap but snapped at their corner edges! or
Also if you want to achieve clean results you’ll need to keep just the visible faces on your lightmap uvs! (…like cut out the covered parts as the books from the mesh’s uv that’s under them!)
Where you see those blocky/pixelated shadows it’s low resolution lightmap! I know you see those tiny resolution in the lightmap res view mode… maybe your wall piece is way too big and contains a lot of detailed lighting information…
…oh yeah just one more thing: if you want detailed indirect shadows you’ll need to go lower (0.6) in your Indirect smoothness!
This also helps to get rid of the shading differences caused by the way lightmass is calculated (every mesh separately!!).