Best Practice for extensive interior level regarding Build Time

Development Platform & Builds Debugging, Optimization, & Profiling
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1

Hi!

I’m still much of a beginner in UE4. What I want to do is building a rather big interior level for a fly through with a camera (export to HD video). So realtime performance isn’t important.

My level will be completely interior (closed Dungeon, only Point Lights and Exponential Height Fog, no outside view) but pretty big. Amount of meshes (Marketplace assets) supposedly around 10.000-15.000 in the end, maybe ~500 light sources (torches and faint point lights to light up dark corners). There are bigger halls, medium rooms and narrow corridors. My level can be divided into several (~4-5) “sub themed” levels, but the transitions are to be seamless.

I already built the first 10%, and after placing just a handful of lights I noticed the Build time going up to 30 minutes (Preview quality).

What are recommended practices for big interior levels regarding lighting and acceptable build times? I need reasonably decent quality and I’m fine with the final build taking up to 80 hours. What can I do to keep my level in these limits? Is working with sub levels (/level streaming) an option? Do Lightmass Importance Volumes make sense for interior scenes?

What I already figured to reduce Build time:

  • World Settings: Reduce Static lighting level scale to 4
  • Reduce or disable lightmass settings for meshes that take long to build according to statistics (like prison bars)
  • Set Lightmap resolution to 32-64 for all objects

My PC Specs, if important: Haswell-Xeon 4x3,5Ghz with HT, 32GB RAM, GTX970, SSD available, Win 8.1

Thank you very much! :slight_smile:

2

There are many tips and tricks on what type and how to use lights to balance performance and quality that you could look up, unfortunately, I’m not very familiar with level design, but I know Incredibuild is designed to speed up compiling and building times so you could check it out, it could help you out to speed up build time. Hope it helps :slight_smile:

3

with 32 GB RAM and wanting to have 10k meshes you will run in problems anyway. do a load test.

4

You really need a better computer (as in, something with more cores), or you need to use swarm with multiple computers.