Tessellation static lighting seams

Hello!

I’ve stumbled upon a problem with tessellation and static lighting.

As you can see below, there is an ugly seam between my cave floor and walls.

The same thing occurs between the walls and ceiling.

As I found out, one way to fix it is to have a solid mesh with no geometry or UV cuts. But at this point, I can’t afford to re-do my cave walls/floor/ceiling. That would practically mean starting the whole project from scratch.

If I disable tessellation, then the whole thing is seamless. But naturally, surfaces do not look nearly as good w/o tessellation.

Is there any way to mitigate this problem somehow?

Ok, I found a workaround for this issue.

I managed to reduce the seams between the floor and the walls by adjusting my height textures for the floor. Tweaking them this way and that way, and then placing a row of deferred decals on top, all the way around the cave perimeter, to further mask the seam.

For the ceiling, I had a different solution:

By using Pixel Depth Offset on the ceiling, and adjusting my geometry here and there, I achieved seamless transition between the meshes.

The downside to that are two things:

-First, the mesh that is using material with Pixel Depth Offset must have “cast shadows” disabled. Otherwise it breaks the illusion.

-Second, I couldn’t use detailed texture simultaneously with Pixel Depth Offset. Not sure why exactly.

These two reasons are why I had to do some voodoo magic and hope for the best to cover seams between the floor and the walls, instead of jut adding Pixel Depth Offset to it.

For the ceiling though, it’s not as important.

Here’s the end result: