This probably reveals a fundamental misunderstanding I have about the rendering pipeline, but it’s my understanding that static lighting basically works by precalculating light behavior and “painting” it over the existing texture. Since static lights are 100% precalculated, they don’t effect characters and other movable meshes- if I make my lightbulbs into static point lights, bake, and then run, the room will be lit by them, but my character can walk underneath them without being visibly lit (hurray!).
My expectation is that skylights function in the same way, where a static skylight won’t effect the character, but a few rudimentary test-bakes show that a brighter static skylight does, in fact, lead to a correspondingly brighter character. Is there a reason for this, or a way to avoid it? I know UE4’s use of deferred rendering means that I can’t use light channels to completely isolate my character models’ lighting from level lighting, but it would be really nice if I could bake ambient light into the level which is brighter than the lighting my characters receive.
