What would be the workflow for lighting lets say a interior scene where the player can switch lights on and of for example like it is in “Layers of Fear”? Preferable with baked lighting in both cases, with and without the lights switched on and off. Could one bake the scene with and without the lights and then switch partial between light maps?
There used to be a thing called lighting scenario where you could bake different lighting scenarios and could switch between them (the exact thing you’re looking for) but lately I’m not sure if it’s still working properly…
Lighting scenario is cool but not made for that, you don’t have any proper way to do it, the fastest one I found was 2 lvl streaming (with their own bake) I was switching on/off, it was faster than a lighting scenario.
You can as well shut down completely all the lightmaps in the post process (GI) and use dynamic only.
You can use stationary lights, but then the indirect lighting will not be animated, so if you go that route you’d have to turn off indirect lighting for that light for it to look good.
The lighting scenarios should still work, but that means switching entirely between lightmaps, and that won’t go quickly. Stationary lights allow you to adjust color and intensity, it just can’t do that for the indirect part of the lighting.
I’ve used a similar option to the first in production and if you’re doing lights on/off, it’s even easier(compared to going from one light color to another).
You can use Stationary and update the direct lighting at runtime, but like darth said the baked lighting won’t be changed. Same if you were to use static lights as well. In that case, update a Post-Process Volume’s Global Illumination section at the same time to update the baked component. It can be a bit janky, and difficult to go from multicolored lights to something else, but if you’re just turning them on and off it should be super simple.
Reflection Actors won’t update this way, but it might not be noticeable depending on your materials. Otherwise you can try precomputing the reflections and switch those as well.