Using dynamic lighting within reason shouldn’t be an issue I don’t think. For Arch Viz I think it could work well if being setup properly, which can require a bit of tweaking to get things right. You can however, use Stationary lighting to get the best of both worlds and for each object that you want to not cast dynamic shadows you can use the lightmaps it has by doing the following:
- Select the mesh you want to cast static shadows and not be lit dynamically
- In the details panel uncheck cast dynamic shadows for the objects you want to have lightmaps baked
- in the details panel uncheck static shadows for the objects you want to be dynamically lit
With this setup you’ll now be able to bake lightmaps for objects you want and have dynamic lighting for your others. For a small scene, depending on the hardware you’ll be using, I wouldn’t imagine there would be a tremendous drop. For Eric and I when we were working on our Ghostbusters side project (Link in my signature if you’re curious) we set everything to dynamic lighting and ran at about ~20 fps for the more heavy parts of that demo. That was mostly during the running parts. The main hallway ran around 30fps with everything casting shadows. If we had planned to do it dynamic we could have turned off shadows on things that didn’t necessarily need them, for instance, every book did not need to be dynamically lit. They would still receive shadows but they certainly didn’t need to cast them. This would have improved out FPS greatly instead of having a couple of thousand books rendering shadows.
I’ve not personally used LPV’s. It is still an experimental feature, thus why you would need to adjust it in the ini file to enable it. There are some known bugs with it with translucent materials and causing crashes though. The users who have used it have used it for outdoor scenes which seems to work well enough.
For your scene is LPV enabled in this? If so, that glow could possibly be attributed to that. I’ve honestly not messed with them that much since they are not included as a standard feature yet. I’ve only looked into crashes that have occurred to make sure those are reported. The LM resolution for the walls should be good. A high resolution probably wouldn’t be necessary.
If this is happening with LPV I could use the Realistic Rendering demo Epic has in the Learn Tab of the launcher. I may be able to see similar results, but that may be attributed to LPVs though if that’s what you’re using.
As for building lighting I did a test a while back to not have to build the entire GB scene with all the books and there is a setup possible. I would consider it a hacky type solution but it works.
Go to the menu bar > Windows > select Levels
A new window will pop up and will have a level listed as Persistent. This is your current level. Create a new level and label it whatever you like. (ie. Room 1, Room 2).
Any object you place in this level can be hidden or shown by clicking the eye next to the level name. If you dont have the level visible with the meshes it has it won’t bake any lighting that is visible in the viewport. There will be a warning telling you this but you can click on past it and bake lighting for only the visible objects. When to see more quickly the results. I recommend when you’re done with the project to bake all lighting with all levels visible though.
I hope this helps, at least a little!
Let me know on the LPV thing if you want me to take a look. If you are using it. It may be a limitation of the process at the moment.
Tim