How to get proper dynamic lighting on skeletal meshes

supremedalek925

Here is a skeletal mesh I have in my scene. I've made a blueprint that lets the player open and close the drawers with a left click.  As you can see on the example on the right, the lighting is incorrect on parts of the mesh that are close to each other when the doors are closed.  I've tried using both stationary and movable light sources, I have a skylight and a lightmass importance volume, and I've enabled distance field shadows, but I still get these shadowy artifacts whether I build lighting or not.  Thank you for your help.

Obscura

Distance field shadows doesn't take skeletal mesh animation into account. It does take movement into account, but not deformation. Distance field shadows doesn't need to be baked though.

supremedalek925

Obscura said:

Distance field shadows doesn't take skeletal mesh animation into account. It does take movement into account, but not deformation. Distance field shadows doesn't need to be baked though.

Without distance field shadows enabled, I still get these results. It's as if shadows are being baked onto my mesh even though it's a skeletal mesh.

Obscura

That is possible. You should disable generate distance fields on the mesh. For skeletal meshes, its possible to use capsule shadows from a physics asset, but that wouldn't really work in your case, thats for characters in indirect lighting. You would need standard shadow maps from a dynamic light, or a stationary one. So just make sure your mesh doesn't make shadows from distance fields. I was also thinking, maybe this could be related to your material ao maybe? Can you show the baked ao map?

supremedalek925

Obscura said:

That is possible. You should disable generate distance fields on the mesh. For skeletal meshes, its possible to use capsule shadows from a physics asset, but that wouldn't really work in your case, thats for characters in indirect lighting. You would need standard shadow maps from a dynamic light, or a stationary one. So just make sure your mesh doesn't make shadows from distance fields. I was also thinking, maybe this could be related to your material ao maybe? Can you show the baked ao map?

Oh my god, I'm sure you're right.  I baked my AO in Substance Painter with my mesh components separated so I assumed there wouldn't be any issues. (There weren't any problems with my baked normals after all) but now that I look at my AO map I see that I'll actually need to bake each mesh piece separately for the AO.

I haven't checked in my scene yet but I'm sure that's it. Thanks for the suggestion.