WTF lightmaps?!

JoshWilkinson

I've made some very, very basic modular wall pieces and plan to paint in a lot more detail in using vertex painting (hence the high poly count on one side of the meshes) but I'm running into hideous problems after the lighting has been baked. Anybody recognize the issue here? I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the windows that sit within the walls?



Here is a look at my lightmaps (obviously offset on the UV space to show each at the same time. They are not exported like this)

And here is what the scene looks like in the different view modes. It obviously looks a trillion times better when it's outside of the scene but it still isn't all that pretty.

sprunghunt

You don't need to pad the light map uvs at the edges. I would go out of my way to snap your light map uvs to a pixel grid. As low resolution as you can 8x8 or 16x16 is good.

And lastly, if you have seams after that, hide them. Try to make the seams look like normal pieces of the architecture.

Sean VanGorder

What sprunghunt said will help, but you'll never be able to completely resolve this lightmass issue, unfortunately. If you bake this with Production quality turned on, it will be much less apparent, but still there. The best ways to get around it are to either use bigger pieces so there are less seams, cover the seams with other meshes, or build the mesh or texture so that natural seams hide the lightmass seams.

Sandro

There are hacks and workarounds that will address some of the issues you have, but seriously, it's not worth it.

Design your modular pieces in a way that takes advantage of natural break points and seams, will save you lots of time and trouble down the line.

JoshWilkinson

Ugh. You guys were right. I just re-sized the modular pieces and got far better results. Changing the edge padding on my light maps didn't really change the results beyond anything other than allow me to utilize more of the UV space, but it's a good thing to know anyway. Thanks for the help