How do I get my shadows to react correctly?

Development Rendering
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1

I am having real trouble getting my shadows just to react correctly. This is using a directional light here. Has anyone encountered this problem before and if so, how can this be resolved?

Thanks!

2

Hi!

If we’re talking about static/stationary lighting then your receiver mesh (floor) doesn’t have enough lightmap resolution to visualize the correct lighting information.

3

Oki doki, thanks.

I’ve read this word lightmap and awful lot but maybe because I’m daft I still have no idea what it is and I can’t seem to find any simple definition. Does this come from the modelling program or is this something in UE4?

I saw a tick box for Override Lightmap Resolution. When I activated it every setting between 0 and 4000 just made everything way worse. Is this the wrong place to go?

Thanks :slight_smile:

4

Well… maybe you should read more about lightmaps and understand it because this is the most crucial part of static/stationary lighting!! If you have problems with your lightmaps you hardly get nice results!!
Basically you have 2 options: either you create your own lightmap uvs inside your 3d app (on a selected uv channel) or let Unreal create it for you during the importing procedure!
Yes you have 2 options to change lightmap resolution: 1 is inside the object’s properties, 2 is in the editor, overriding the one in the properties!
If you want to achieve nice/realistic shadows you’ll need at least 512 lightmap resolution for your floor!!

5

So, after doing some more reading and watching a couple of videos, what I can gather is the light map is just a UV map? There seems to be literally no difference to me. So the UV map for the textures will be the exact same for the light map. Maybe a bit more attention and thought is needed to ensure no light is bleeding over to parts of the map that are meant to be in shadow?

I think I have a little trouble with scale on my UV maps. Bringing my models into UE4 (From Modo) I am having to set me UE4 UV tiling to 100 instead of 1. So that will just be a setting I need to change in Modo probably.

Either way My shadows are ‘happening’ where I would expect them to be.

Thanks very much for replying to my question!