Problem with lightmap. I tried almost everything (except the right way).

[Ivan84]

Hi, i have a problem with an house's mesh.
It is 2 weeks i'm trying to understand how to create lightmaps and how to do it for this house (i have other 5 houses like this to do).
I tryed in many many ways but i always have the same problem, in the picture there are different problems but the one i can't solve is the dark area above the windows.

This is the problem:


This is the model (i bought it):


This is the last try i did for the lightmap (the selected part is the front of the house):


Can someone help me with this?
How can i unvrap the front to avoid this bad shadows?

[darthviper107]

2 things--one is make sure you've adjusted the lightmap resolution in UDK for the static mesh, by default it's 32 (which is 32x32) so you'll probably need to increase that (power of 2 numbers). Besides that it looks like possibly you don't have any smoothing applied to the mesh. Apply a Smooth modifier in 3ds Max and set it to auto-smooth and then when you export make sure that the smoothing is turned on.

[Ivan84]

It wooooooooooooooooooooooorks. Two weeks of pain for a smooth modifier.
Thank you for the answer.
I didn't apply the smooth modifier but I created the smoothing group manually, is it different to apply a smooth modifier or create the smoothing group on the faces?

[darthviper107]

It's often better to do it manually. It just depends on whether an automatic smoothing can provide the results you need. With game meshes it often works just fine, but if you have rounded corners and smoothing it can end up smoothing things you don't want it to.