lighting and shadows

[123shua]

Hi all,
im having some problems creating good looking shadows in my level.
at first there were no light maps, after understanding how to use light maps the shadow still looked crappy that's because i had to unwrap a building which made the map resolution crappy. do i have to use light maps ? because that means i have to seperate each wall of the building light map it and export it seperatly which make the proccess hard is there an other way ?
either batch the proccess in unreal or light it without light map ??

thanks.

[Grom]

How large are your buildings? Ideally you should construct your buildings out of modular pieces which can then have reasonably sized lightmaps of their own. If you must have large monolithic buildings, you can either bump up the lightmap resolution and/or manually unwrap the models to give more UV space and hence higher lightmap texel density in the parts where you need it.

You could force your lights to be dynamic instead of generating lightmaps, but your level could run a lot more slowly.

[123shua]

in the viewport the shadows look great, isnt there another way to light the map so it will look the same ?

[Grom]

If you mean the rough shadows in the viewport (i.e. the hard dynamic shadows before you rebuild the lighting) then select your light and in the Light Component rollout tick Force Dynamic Light and Cast Dynamic Shadows. You could also change Light Shadow Mode to LightShadow_Normal for even harder shadows.

You should be aware that the Unreal engine is optimised to work best when using lightmaps for all static meshes and brushes, with various tricks to get approximate dynamic shadows - in the long run it might be better to do things The Unreal Way for an easier life