I've seen a lot of good tutorials on light maps, one of my favorites is one by the world of level design that goes pretty deep on light maps in the the Unreal engine. My question is how much space between UV's do you really need in your light maps to make them look good? In the tutorials I've seen it shows quite a lengthy amount of space between UV's, but when I look at some of UE4's Mesh's light maps, the UV's are very close together in some places and the Mesh still looks amazing. Any ideas or suggestions?
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[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eDjhOtiyuo&list=UUHuzwCBMsExSsORBmDzhGYA"]UDK: Lightmap Basics - Introduction to Lightmapping with UDK Part 1/4 [Tutorial #18] - YouTube[/ame]
Is the text version of the same tutorial, which is easier to reference back to specific steps. Really good stuff in there.
In UE4 and UDK the meshes they have(made by epic) sometimes have "large" shadows maps, you can change this in the object options as well the channel of uvws for the shadows maps.
Mine is 64 but is very low, also check what uv are you looking.. and you can do thins like keep the faces that are behind the object together as they will be always dark, if you put close a "dark" face with a front face with low res you probably are going to have bad shadows.( that I did't count in that object..)
Good job mate, will spend time over this.