Who can explain of "Lighting Scenario" feature?

Pirate_Tony · October 22, 2016, 12:00pm

Please anybody explain of “Lighting Scenario” feature… How it works? How to setup, how to use?
Thanks

Tim_Hobson · October 24, 2016, 9:08pm

Hi Tony,

If you’ve used Level streaming this is a very similar process to that. Not very hard to pick up on.

Create your level with your geometry for starters. Then open the Levels panel (Window > Levels)
Make a sub-level named “Day” or whatever type of lighting scenario you want. Do the same for a second level for “Night” or whatever you’d like.
In the Level’s panel, Right-click on your Day and Night levels and select Lighting Scenario > Change to Lighting Scenario.
Hide one of the levels for Day/Night.
In this level add your lights and things needed for day light settings. (In my example, I added a Skylight, Directional Light, and BP_SkySphere).
Build Lighting for this scenario. With the Night Level visibility turned off (click the visibility eye). You’ll get a warning about building with a hidden level. Click Yes, so it’ll build lighting with the other hidden and then click the Build in button in the next warning. The lighting Build will now commence.
Once the Light Build finishes. Hide the Day Level and Unhide the Night level. Add your Lights and setup for the night lighting here. Build lighting and do the same things from step 6.
Once that completes you now have the lighting scenarios for both set up for use.
Open the Persistent Level Blueprint and use the Load Stream Level and Unload Stream Level nodes to load and unload the Day/Night levels. The lighting data for each is carried with them.

In the end, you should see something similar to this for the lighting changes if you’ve set up a day/night switch.

The benefit here is that with a lighting scenario you can build the static lighting for a level and it’s only loading the lightmap data and not having to switch out the environment meshes or do some form of hacky level tricks to get different lighting scenarios.

Only one lighting scenario should be loaded at a time.

I hope this helps and if you have any follow-up questions something isn’t working exactly for you feel free to ask.

Tim

EDIT: You don’t need to hide the levels when you go to build lighting. If both are shown it will build them separately. The only time you need to hide is when you’re adding lighting to these specific Scenarios. It makes it easier to see what you’ve got with the preview lighting.

Pirate_Tony · October 24, 2016, 9:56pm

That is what i need. Very good explanation. Thank you so much.

anonymous_user_e4999f37 · November 18, 2016, 5:54am

Thx！That’s very clear！

anonymous_user_0278fce9 · February 3, 2017, 6:14am

Thanks!. There is one more question.

When using level streaming and light scenario at the same time,
When is the non-streamed level’s lightmap loaded?

At switching light scenario?
or at loading the non-streamed level?

thanks.

Pirate_Tony · February 3, 2017, 9:39am

It works only with streaming methods. Few Levels used like lightmap switch for another unhidden levels. Be care - it consume more memory.

Tim_Hobson · February 3, 2017, 2:53pm

Both are loaded and just switched when called. As PirateTony mentions it will consume more memory, so you have to be careful.

anonymous_user_f9054581 · February 11, 2017, 7:27am

Will this method only work with baked lighting? What if I have skeleton meshes animating through a scene that require dynamic lighting? WIll the dynamic lights from a hidden level still interact with the active level? I seem to be having some funny issues with the sky light in my scene. I haven’t quite nailed down what it is just yet, but this information is very helpful. Thanks for the response here, coming from a VFX lighting background I can see some really great potential in the new persistent level/lighting scenario workflow.

Tim_Hobson · February 11, 2017, 7:23pm

@Jordan.Harvey

The idea behind these Lighting Scenarios was a way to use the same geometry for the level with different static lighting without having to make a copy of the level. That’s the main benefit of lighting scenarios here. With dynamic lighting you could really just use a sub-level that houses your different dynamic lights and swap those out. That’s not to say you cannot just put these dynamic lights in your lighting scenarios either, but again, the original purpose of them was to easily swap out static lighting for the level’s geometry.

kaddouri_mohamed · February 23, 2017, 9:21pm

hi tim and thanks for the explanation, but i tryed what you said and it works in the viewport when toggling on and off sublevels but in game it load the night scenario instead of day any idea why?

anonymous_user_8bafcfec · April 5, 2017, 9:02pm

Hi Tim. I have 3 Lighting Scenarios in my level. When I bake with all of them turned on the scenarios end up looking different than if I turn each on and bake individually. Mostly brighter.

Each lighting scenario currently contains a SkyLight and a directional light as well as Height Fog and a Skydome static mesh since those change values with the different times of day and the sky dome contributes to the SkyLight capture.

In each scenario the directional light has different rotation, intensity and color, The Skylight has different intensity and indirect lighting intensity.

I’ll try and put together a repro case but maybe you know of something I’m doing with these that is incorrect - like having “non-lights” in my lighting scenarios for instance.

anonymous_user_4230003f · April 13, 2017, 8:47am

I did this and there are no Volume Lighting Samples for either the main level or the sub-levels. And I have movable objects in the scene, that are independent from the sub-levels. Since the Volume lighting samples are not generated the movable objects look completely dark.

Prouticus · April 24, 2017, 4:25pm

Hi Tim - is it possible to use Lighting Scenarios in combination with World Composition? We’re not seeing the “Lighting Scenarios” option in the right-click menu in the Layers tab.

anonymous_user_6645ae4e · April 26, 2017, 5:07pm

When doing lighting scenarios, which world settings are used? The ones on the main level or the ones on the Lighting scenario level.
In robot recall it seems the one on the main level is used , but practically it would be better if the ones on the Lighting scenario level are used.
Anyone knows about this?

anonymous_user_4230003f · April 26, 2017, 5:25pm

I’m pretty sure that the main level’s world settings are used. I also think that you can bake the lighting independently for each level (using different world settings for each level) and then make them lighting scenario sublevels. However I cannot confirm the latter, since I’m not at the PC atm.

CelestialCel · May 13, 2017, 4:49pm

I’ve just tried this, with 6 simple static points lights per level, however upon building the second level after the first level it invalidates the first level. So I constantly have to rebuild the other level. Anyone ever had this and knows how to solve that?

UE 4.15

Edit: If i build with both on it still tells me to build lighting in one of the two.

pmlvl · March 7, 2018, 11:40pm

Thank You!