Specular Seams with lightmass, any ideas?

polygoo

maybe some of you unreal guys can help me figure this out, this might be a dumb mistake, but I cant get a consistent specular transition with 2 pieces of geo placed next to each other in unreal welded or not, i'm building a slice of a bowl essentially, and i'd like it to be modular so that in unreal i can rotate each of these 18* and place them next to each other. I tried just doing it in max and exporting it pre-welded and overlapped uv's but that wont even work, and I still get these seams

its basically almost like a slice of a bowl that i'd like to be able to rotate to build a whole shape

does lightmass just hate modular methods like this or am I doing something wrong?

sorry for super rough test images, this has been driving me nuts

polygoo

another shot of what the seams look like at more extreme angles

Ken Benson

I'd suggest making a square shape out of your lightmap whenever possible. Pure vertical and horizontal islands. This always gives me much better results. If this doesn't work, browse through the rest of this site. There are many posts with issues relating to lightmaps.

tristamus

Since you are using Max, I wouldn't know how to go about this, but I would definitely check your vertex normals on the edges of your mesh where the seams are appearing. If the vertex normals are wonky and pointing outwards at 45 degree angles (or close to), this could be causing seams for you.

Basically, edit your vertex normals so that they point straight outwards and UPwards from your mesh. Make your vertex normals have the same direction as your main face normals on those pieces of geometry.

I know this is difficult to understand with words...if you need further explanation please let me know.

Xendance

Does this help?

Olli.

That is quite an interestin article Xendance! thanks for that

dissonance

Xendance wrote: »

Does this help?

oh i see it now, it's twice as bright because falling on two separate world coords is being mapped to one texture coord.
makes sense, actually!

polygoo

Thanks guys, I tried all these but nothing helped..so odd..

SpeCter

To me it looks more like a normal issue. Are the normals on the edges are pointing in the same direction? Did you export with vertex normals?

maxivz

Im facing exactly the same issues, followed a lot of tutorials on how to fix the seams and they are still there
Try taking a look at this maybe it helps, it fixed most of my errors but i still get weird stuff
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntx10JMl9f4"]Fixing Lighting Seams in UDK - YouTube[/ame]

Heres a screenshot of how mine looks, normals are all ok, lightmap uvs have been made following a grid of 32 pixels, so the uv map wont end inbetween a pixel and break the light, smothing groups all ok, well, no clue what the problem is

Ace-Angel

What about the Normal Map? Are there any extra settings you might played with? Could you show use any info related to the Normals?

If you're still having issues, you could force your speculars to take a flat vector for the normals instead of the normal maps info, it's abit long winded, but here is what I mean: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=82286

Also, do you have Allow Lightmaps Specular enabled?

HAWK12HT

Follow what Xendance posted. Also Lightmap need to b flat should take 80% of 0 1 space, leave 20 around edges light padding. I know its not good to leave 20 padding on 0 1 UV space, u need only 5 or 10% accoiding to UDK docs. But lets say try it :P, see what happens.

HAWK12HT

check Free tut on 3d Motive
http://www.3dmotive.com/training/free/creating-a-lightmap-uv-channel/?follow=true