Specular issues with baked lighting

tadpole3159

Hi guys, I need some help.

I've got this modular temple that I'm making. I have only just started putting it together in UDK and I'm stuck. when I bake my light maps things go weird. below is an example of the scene before i bake them.

looks fine to me. notice the specular highlights



Now after i bake light maps.



the lighting is different across each modular piece.
I have decent light map uv's in my second uv channel and they aren't flipped. the meshes have smoothing groups and triangles are fine. I've ran out of things to check.

has anyone ever come across this before?

radiancef0rge

This is pretty standard there are ways to generally make it better in unreal I would personally suggest assembling the pieces in max/maya and weld them together and make a uv channel for them all together.

tadpole3159

that's what i did, I rotated all my pieces in max, merged them, welded verts, fixed smoothing groups, reset xforms and then exported as a single mesh into udk. and thats my result.
I just did a test to look at the rotated uv's issue. here you can see i have assigned a texture with arrows all pointing in one direction. in the image below you can see all the rotated pieces. and once i assign a simple material in udk with a pink colour plugged into the diffuse and spec you get this crappy result. notice the different shades on each element

now if you rotate each element in the uv's so they flow in a singular direction you get this result, perfect right? well no cause now its not modular and my textures are fucked.

how on earth do i fix this?

tadpole3159

I just woke up this morning and has a brainwave. if i rotate all of the chunks so they flow in a single direction it works. but it has to be UV channel one right? so if i swap the lightmap channel (default channel 2) with the texture channel (default channel 1) and rotate my new lightmap uv's around so they flow in one direction it should work.
and it totally does!


Edit: New image

thanks for the help guys