Hi,
I’m writing to ask for a new feature, if possible.
Can you please add the option (As it’s possible in a Movable Mesh with the command “Light as if Static”) to make a Lightmap baking possible on a Skeletal Mesh?
That would help a lot with architectural visualizations with an important (Stationary or static) Skylight and moving doors, drawers etc…
Thanks so much for your attention.
Kind regards,
Not possible since the very nature of Skeletal Meshes and Moveable lights is that they move, you can’t therefore bake a light-map into a moving object - since lightmaps are supposed to be static and pre-computed.
Those aren’t good reasons to disallow it. It’s already possible to bake static lighting to a moving objects using Light as if Static, just not skinned moving objects.
When you’re not aiming for photo-realism, or targeting lower-end hardware, it’s commonplace for character artists to bake or paint “static lighting” into their diffuse maps.
There’s a clear need for it here. OP could try to recreate his scene’s lighting and bake his own light maps in Vray or something, but that’s a huge amount of work to get around a problem that doesn’t really need to exist.
There are no plans that I’m aware of to implement this kind of feature.
If you need to have more specific lighting and such for your material why not just use a texture that is applied in your material to do this? That would be the easier route to take.
Curious, how would one say easily bake AO or some “super-fancy GI” into the skeletal mesh textures in UE4 itself? What is the normal workflow for baking such textures? Doing it in an external 3D program and then importing the texture? So far in learning UE4 I’m confused about this part.
Perhaps the OP is also referring to a character, say used as a statue, that then comes “alive”. One would want the statue version (skeletal mesh instance) to be statically-lit with Lightmass, then after it comes alive one would want to use the dynamic instance of the skeletal mesh to be dynamically lit.
Also would be useful for “character trophies” eg. in Batman where they have the characters very nicely lit - easily having “character trophies” lit with Lightmass, with the exact same skeletal mesh asset as the dynamic-lit characters, that would be great.
So this would be a situation where one would have a single character in UE4 with several LOD, then the most high-poly LOD would be for fancy marketing renders (still), pre-rendered cutscenes (eg. “bullet time”) etc. which is statically lit. Then other LOD static and dynamic lit for more “in-game” purposes… All without having to leave UE4 once the skeletal mesh, animations and textures are imported.
This would have come in handy in a project I’m wokring on which has a lot of dead bodies on the ground. They never move but they’re the same mesh as other living characters.
There is always the possibility to create a static Mesh out of Skeletal Meshes.