I’m working on a small open city environment with a time of day system, given the limited size of the environment I thought I could use a stationary skylight to get some of the benefits of baked indirect lighting while also keeping a dynamic sun to control the time of day. My plan was to just change the color/intensity of the skylight at runtime as the sun sets.
But I’ve run into a couple of frustrating problems.
- Bounce lighting is apparently completely static so although the intensity of stationary lights can be changed, the bounces are still full strength even with the light at 0 intensity. My solution thus far has been to severely limit the indirect lighting strength and then use the exposure controls to try to hide the rest. It works okay but I may just end up scrapping indirect lighting entirely and just using it for AO…
- I thought the baked lighting would store some shadow or ambient occlusion information in the volumetric lightmap but this doesn’t appear to be the case, so moveable objects are fully lit by the skylight in tunnels and interiors. I’m used to dealing with this through exposure modification in dynamicly lit scenes but that won’t work in this case because there’s such a huge disparity between the baked statics and the moveables.
I'm really baffled by this one because the older indirect lighting cache DOES properly shadow moveables in occluded areas while VLM does not. I don't really see any solution to this other than ditching VLM entirely.
Has anyone worked with this kind of setup that can give me some advice on how you dealt with these? (or other problems I have not encountered yet?)
