Lightmap Seams!

biofrost

Right now I have the lightmap res at 256 and in my lightmap unwrap I have no overlapping uv's. Where I'm having the problem there is no break in the unwrap. Any suggestions? This has been driving me crazy.

Edit:I should note it only looks like that if view from a angle, straight on it looks fine.

Edit2: I put the same static mesh in one of the pre build lighting maps(afternoon lighting)and the problem is gone. Though if I add my own point light the problem comes back. Seem to be fine with a dominant direction light.

Bal

Are you overlapping anything on your first UV set? (not the lightmap one), I know that causes some problems with specularity lighting sometimes once the lightmaps are baked, try moving anything overlapped out of the 0-1 range.

biofrost

Yeah any overlapped uv's are in the 0-1 range. The really odd thing is that it only happens with point lights. If I place a movable point light there is no seam.

Xendance

Have you built with production settings? Preview settings calculate a very rough version of the indirect lighting and that makes the seams more visible.

biofrost

Yeah it is on production. I just find it very odd that it only happens with point lights . When using Movable point lights the light is reflecting fine. Could there be some kind of setting in the point light that is causing this?

Calypso75

This only occurs when using baked lighting. Dominant directional lights and movable point lights calculate its direct lighting dynamically so they wouldn't be affected by this problem.

biofrost

Thank you, seems like my only choice is to use the movable point lights. Is there any disadvantages to using it compared to normal point lights? Im guessing just a framerate hit.

Calypso75

UDK is meant to work with baked lights for the most part. Using exclusively dynamic lights would cripple the engine pretty fast (unless you're using the DX11 features I guess), and you would miss out on some of the benefits of light maps like global illumination.

I mentioned in another thread that turning the Normal Boost Influence in the World Properties down to 0 may help with a similar issue.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntx10JMl9f4"]Fixing Lighting Seams in UDK - YouTube[/ame]

This video gets passed around a bit. It fixes the black seams you get between modular pieces, it could possibly fix the specular seam problem as well but I'm not positive. It works, but it's kind of a best case scenario fix. Your UV islands seem to all be rectangular with straight outer edges so it's doable in this case.

If you look around at some of Epics own maps you'll see this problem present in some areas. At the end of the day the best solution might just be to cover up these seams with a pillar or something.

sprunghunt

for a long straight section like that you should just join all the lightmap UVs end-to-end so there aren't any seams.