Hi, I have run into a problem with CPU baked lighting. I am making a flat with interactive doors and I am struggling to make them be shaded appropriately after lighting bake, because if I bake lighting with the GPU lightmass plugin, it works as expected, but it has a lot of artifacts on static and dynamic meshes alike. In oppose to that, if I bake my lighting with CPU, then it is beautiful with no artifacts, but the doors dont get shaded appropriately, light just passes through them, almost as if they were glowing.
On this screenshot, the door and the wall surrounding it are using the exact same material instance, yet they are drastically differently shaded.
Thanks for help in advance
If you’re using Static Lights I recommend you to change them to Stationary Lights.
Static lights bake all the shadows and lights to the assets, so will not work for a object that it moves. While the Stationary Lights bake a lot of the information but allows you to have dynamic shadows.
The baked lighting system is problematic for doors. When it tries to add some indirect lighting to the door it will create a blend of the inside and the outside lighting which will mean that it won’t match either.
The best you can do is to mess with the volumetric lightmaps so that it creates probes that more closely match the lighting in the location where the object is and it can use multiple probes across the mesh: Volumetric Lightmaps | Unreal Engine Documentation
I noticed this as well and I think its a bug. Im not sure if its related, but stationary lights dont bake shadows with static objects. It will cast a RT shadow for movable object and for static objects it doesn’t do anything when baking lights. Also after the bake the moveable objects look like the door above.
This is with cpu lighting though, gpu lightmass gives a much better result with the doors, but that way the static objects look bad, instead of the dynamic ones. (Lesser density gives better results with GPU lightmass)
In the reply to darthviper107 is the result which also includes setting the lighting type to static instead of stationary, and it is the same as before (it is brighter because gpu lightmass needs higher intensity on my directional light to achieve similar results, and I forgot to tune it down).
Didn’t try moveable, since it obviously doesn’t bake.
Since you mentioned encountering this aswell, then if there is a workaround or different approach for similar results, please share if possible!
I tried the GPU lightmass bake and it does give me a better result with shading moveable objects and the baked environment. I dont understand why GPU gives better results, besides having to enable Ray tracing to use the GPU lightmass baking.
In your GPU lightmass build it doesn’t look like the material matches how the material looks in the other places though, it’s extremely green (probably bounce lighting from the green walls nearby) It should look much more white though if it were accurate. It’s the issue of using probes to add indirect lighting to something like a door, like I said the lighting on the inside doesn’t match the lighting outside yet both will be blended together and it throws off how the door should look.
Split the door in 2 parts.
Bake the inside, then bake the outside as separate levels.
Provided you don’t have a spotlight on the door or anything else that makes it look wierd, you usually get decent to non-noticable results when you then mix the item back to movable. And “neglect” to bake lights again.
This used to work for publishing in 4. No idea for 5.
He wants the doors to be able to open and close, so he wouldn’t be able to use them set as Stationary meshes. Stationary meshes would be lit just like a movable mesh so he would be getting the same results.
My doors (metal rollup doors) our skeletal meshes (movable only), they have to be one mesh and the lighting is the same on both sides on the door (not introducing any crazy light there). When I bake the scene with cpu lightmass the doors (all skeletal meshes) look really bad, which is strange because this never happened before (UE4). However if I bake using the gpu lightmass I get the better result I would expect. Just sucks that you have to have a video card supporting Raytracing to bake lights.
