Lighting MIPing? LODing?

knak47

So there was a post earlier about Texture Quality by "reanix", and it got me thinking of a current issue I am having. My meshes and shading seems to look like sh*t at certain distances. I have separate channels for my light maps and nothing is overlapping all I have in this mock scene is a spot light, and I am using lightmass when I build. The mesh is mirrored down the middle just so you are aware. The issues are definitely showing up where polygons meet on the mesh, but the smoothing groups are the same, the texture has the correct color beneath all the islands which leads me to believe it isn't MIPing. I know this has to be some dumb setting I am missing because other assets that are very similar have no issues. Basically my meshes just POP at different distances, but its the lighting, something with the lighting right? The first picture there is no issue. the second there is a huge shadow problem, and the third one you can definitely see the seam where the polys are.

Visceral

First of all, break your posts into readable format.
Sounds like lightmap LOD'ing, not sure i keep loosingmyself in the text.

Farfarer

How closely packed are your lightmap UVs and how are you generating them? You still want to leave some UV island padding in there, otherwise you'll get bleeding from other UV islands when the lightmap mips down.

The resolution for lightmaps are often considerably lower than the textures you'll have applied, too - so the effect gets magnified more easily.

sprunghunt

In Unreal you will get a seam in your specular anywhere there's a UV split and the normals aren't parralel (eg: it's not flat). Even if the surface is flat you can still get a seam on the model.

In the case of the pipe you have there I just wouldn't unrwap it like that. I'd go into max and make a new lowpoly and render to texture from one to the other so there isn't a UV seam running across the front of the pipe like that.

Not having to fix a visible seam because you've hidden it is much better than having to do some kind of technical fix.

knak47

So it turned out to be my light map UVs. I had generated them in Max and was being lazy and just automatically unwraped them. For some reason Max broke up my UV islands. I just did my light map over again and it was all good. Don't know why Max broke up my Uv islands though. I usually custom make my light maps but was trying to cut corners since all islands were overlapping due to the mirrored nature of the asset. Anyway thanks for your input guys.