Dark Edges on imported models, Water Material Type, HDRI Map quality

[sachaandraos]

This is my very first project with Shapespark, I’m having a few little errors I cant figure out after reading many blog posts.
The first is the dark edges around many of the imported pieces (Imported from 3dsmax). The scene is big so that could have something to do with it (around 2 million faces)
I am using 800 samples and 200 Lightmap Resolution and even baked with 8 Lightmaps to see if that would fix it and it hasn’t, Also increased the Dark Flood Limit way up and i’m still having the same issue, so i’m wondering if anyone can shed some light on it.

(New users can only attach one image so I will try to post more in the comments)

The next small issue is probably of the same root cause but again, ive read similar posts but all solutions seem to be increasing samples or resolution. Which are both pretty much maxed out.
Its the small black lines where two surfaces join, this could also be due to a simplified mesh leaving gaps in the geometry?
(New users can only attach one image so I will try to post in the comments)

Then I am using the new water material type. I have yet to figure it out properly so any added info on that would be great. But as it stands, the water is reflecting the sofa here as if it were above it. Should my light probe be lower or is this the only outcome you can expect. Is there a way to reflect something that is sitting on a mirrored surface?
(New users can only attach one image so I will try to post in the comments)

And finally (finally) my HDRI map even in high resolution is coming out very blurred. Is there a way to maintain a high quality image where you can see out of the otherwise closed scene?
(New users can only attach one image so I will try to post in the comments)

I hope these are simple things to answer for someone who’s worked a bit with the software and the support here seems to be great so fingers crossed.

All the best

[jan]

The dark edges are visible in places where the geometry is partially occluded. Because lightmap pixels have limited resolution one pixel can cover area that is fully illuminated and area that is occluded. Such pixel will be darker than fully illuminated pixels. Furthermore, when lightmap data is used by shaders, the data from four neighboring pixels is interpolated. Without such interpolation there would be hard checkered pattern instead of smooth changes between pixels. Because of the interpolation, if a bright pixel has occluded dark neighbors, these neighbors will cause the pixel to be darker close to the pixel edges.

Flood dark filter tries to mask these problems, but it can’t handle all cases and if you will increase the threshold too much, it can start to remove some legitimate shadow details.

In some cases you can improve the geometry to fix these problems. For example, make sure the furniture is always above the floor, if a small part of a furniture is below the floor, it can be baked as dark, and can cause the darkness to leak above the floor level.

Could you post a link to the uploaded scene with water so we can take a look if it can be improved?

As for the HDRI, the sky texture resolution for desktops is limited to 4096x2048. Close to 100% of devices support such size, but only about 60% support larger size (these stats are available here: https://webglstats.com/webgl/parameter/MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE). If your windows are facing only on one side of the world, you could put a texture on a large rectangle object visible through the windows, instead of using a 360 panorama (for example this scene: https://buildav.shapespark.com/musterappartement/ does this). If you do so, set lightmap resolution to 0 for such a rectangle to save lightmap space and baking time.

[sachaandraos]

Hi Jan,
Thanks for getting back to me and answering my questions even without images.

This is the scene i’m working on (its in its very early stages, i’m basically still testing to see if it’s possible)
https://sachaandraos.shapespark.com/space/

You’ll find the water in the first room to the left once you go up the stairs. You’ll see its reflecting the top of the sofa rather than the bottom.

Do you have a fix for the dark edges around some pieces of furniture? Would that get sorted in a smaller scene with therefore a better resolution? This is the one thing really holding me back at the moment and it would be great to know how to proceed.

Thanks a lot for looking at this.

[jan]

Here are some issues:

You have two large spheres yellow and red that are very close to each other. Due to quantization these spheres start to overlap in some places, which causes these black dots:

Removing the hidden red sphere, should fix this issue.

Reduce lightmap resolution for large cylinder and corridors objects. These don’t need detailed shadows, so even resolution 10 should work well for them. But keep a larger resolution for all objects on which furniture is placed. For example this floor has too small resolution (10), which causes the checkered shadows:

In the Objects tab, objects with non-default resolution are shown in dark blue.

To improve the reflection positioning in the water, move the light probe down and enable a bounding box for it with dimensions like: min: 8, -11, 0, max: 14, -5, 4
Try also using much darker color for the water, this way the reflection color will be taken from the surrounding in much larger extend.

[sachaandraos]

Jan that was extremely helpful, thank you very much.
Really appreciate you taking the time out to look into that for me

Sacha