Static meshes lighting issue

[PalmliX]

I'm trying to convert brushes made in the editor into static meshes, all seems to work as expected except for the lighting. While the static meshes correctly cast shadows onto the environment, they don't seem to respond to lighting much or at all. I've tried messing with as many settings I could find, nothing seems to work.

I thought it might be because the mesh was using the same texture file as the brush, so I exported the texture and re-imported it using a different compression type, but it made no difference.

Is there something I'm missing?

Two brushes side by side:

2brushes.PNG

Left brush converted into a static mesh:

1mesh.PNG

[yrex .]

That's because they use vertex lighting (as opposed to a lightmap), which is too coarse for low-poly meshes like this.

A simple workaround is to enable flat shading (Mesh properties -> StaticMesh -> Materials -> ... -> SmoothingGroup: -1).

A better fix would be to divide them into more polygons.

I also heard that there's a way to enable lightmaps on them in ≥227j, which would probably be even better, but I don't know how to do it.

[PalmliX]

Thanks yrex! Of course! Vertex lighting not having lighting precision on low poly models makes so much sense! So I round tripped the column through blender adding a bunch of verts in the process... and it's basically the same result

The lighting at least is higher resolution now as you'd expect with the addition of a bunch more verts, but there still seems to be a clamp/cap on the upper brightness limit. I've tried every setting I can think of and nothing seems to affect it.

Your flat shading trick was nice and did help a bit, I even added another mesh imported straight from blender to see if there was a problem with how I created the mesh in the editor but even though all 3 of these objects share the exact same texture, there is clearly a massive difference in brightness comparing brushes to meshes.

2mesh.PNG

As you can see there are plenty of verts so I think we can at least rule out a lack of lighting precision causing weirdness

verts.PNG

I even tried a pure white texture, the lighting response of meshes is just much darker

white_texture.PNG

While looking around the mesh settings I did see what I think you were talking about regarding the lightmaps being able to be applied to a mesh. I think it uses a UV2 map in order to overlay the lightmap, however I'm still not sure how to add a UV2 map to the mesh, unless it's simply adding a 2nd UV map in which case I'll test doing that later when I get home from work.