When it comes to UE4 lighting i’m a complete noob so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but is it possible to have Baked (Pre-rendered) Global illumination and
Ambient Occlusion but no baked shadows; If its possible i’m intending the shadows to be static (then why avoid baked shadows?) because i want the ability to drag
and drop any static mesh without messing with light maps and UV’s (I’m a programmer not an artist) but still have the benefits of Global illumination and
Ambient Occlusion that has no artifacts like SSAO.
Edit : when i say “Drag and drop” i mean drag and drop then build lighting.
Movable directional light + static skylight? I’m fairly sure that directional lights can be used to light only indirect lighting too, but skylight does a good job at it anyway.
This can easily be done if you bake a room, but have a bunch of moveable objects. The best way to do this would be to use moveable static meshes, they can receive some lighting information from the indirect lighting cache, and you can up the quality of the cache, and how the static meshes use it. The room and walls would need to be static and baked for best results and too many objects would slow it down. Capsule shadows can also give amazing looking indirect shadows and cheap direct shadows.
You can’t have baked anything without lightmaps and lightmap UVs.
Use Distance Field Ambient Occlusion and Light Propagation Volumes. For things to work out the way you seem to want them to, you need fully dynamic lighting.
DFAO also has a large performance impact and isn’t really viable for a finished game, it’s kind of a beta feature. LPV is abandoned/outdated.
My suggested method should work fine, if you are okay with messing with the UVs and lightmaps just for the walls/floor/ceiling. The you will miss GI from the objects, but that shouldn’t be a huge issue most of the time, and you will still get soft shadows.