(UE4) Lighting still sucks

mistergood100

I have all my light map UVs set (not overlapping), and no more degenerate tangent errors. Yet my light baking still looks like it does when these error do occur. What the heck is the problem? Could the pieces of a lightmap be too small? I have no idea what is going on, but I need to get it fixed. Thanks for the help guys

mistergood100

I wonder if it's lightmap bleeding. The objects in question are buildings so its a large amount of pieces so I ended up just automatic mapping and using layout (I know not the best method but I thought it would work). So if that is the problem, should I just make each piece in the object have its own lightmap, and then keep the objects separate when importing them to UE4?

EliasWick

Could you post an image?
Lightmaps will always be there to annoy you... The maps are very simple but you always forget something.

Now on to some questions:
What kind of model is it (A car, chair, etc...)?
How big is the model?
How many triangles?
Have you reimported the mesh?
How many texture maps do you have (UV channels)?
What software do you use for creating the model?
Have you flattened the mesh?
Is the mesh all stitched together?
What lightmap settings are you using?
How big is the second UV channel?
Is the second UV channel assigned to the model?
and so on and so forth... Answer some of the more important questions above and I'll try to help you out.

mistergood100

So the problem that I am having is with buildings. I have some smaller props which seem to be doing fine, but they also have much much simpler light maps. However, these buildings are very large and complicated compared to the other props. Approximately 3300 tris (due to some beveling). Maya was used for modeling and UVing. The objects are separate, such as the main building, the window frames, the signs, the doors, columns, and such, around 22 parts. The first map shown is the texture UV map (don't mind the cloudy texture on the building, was using it for finding degenerate tangents). The second UV is the lightmap. Now the problem is that I'm still not great with lightmaps so while for smaller objects I can easily custom make the lightmap UV, when it comes to large objects such as this, that becomes a whole lot harder, so I used an automatic unwrap and layout. Now I know that this is not the best solution to make one, but I don't know of a better way that won't suck up such a huge amount of time (especially since this building is about in the middle of the complexity meter for all my models). So if you have a better way of doing this that will allow more spacing for the light to be baked, then that would be fantastic and I would really appreciate any tips. Thanks!

sprunghunt

mistergood100 said:

I have all my light map UVs set (not overlapping), and no more degenerate tangent errors. Yet my light baking still looks like it does when these error do occur. What the heck is the problem? Could the pieces of a lightmap be too small? I have no idea what is going on, but I need to get it fixed. Thanks for the help guys

it's better to have your mesh unwrapped as fewer pieces than lots of tiny pieces. Have a look at the lightmap documentation here: 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/Types/StaticMeshes/LightmapUnwrapping/index.html

there's lots of building examples.