Best practices for lighting a proceduraly generated level?

Development Rendering
1

Hello- So I’ve googled this topic, and most of the results I’ve found date to 2014, so I apologize for repeating the question. Basically I have a game about a haunted house, with dozens of modular rooms. At runtime, the rooms snap together in a unique arrangement. I’m having trouble getting the lights to look nice.

modular_lighting.gif

I am aiming for an art style similar to Layers of Fear ( http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/391720/ss_008e00782daa1fd5abb3ed8883d063c68915e695.1920x1080.jpg )

Am I correct in making the following assumption: If 100% of the meshes in my scene are moved into position when the game starts, I can not use static lights at all?

If that assumption is correct I don’t know what the best approach would be. Is it possible/practical to bake lighting into an emissive material? If so, I would need a custom material for each of my dozens of rooms, right? Currently I’m using shared materials in many rooms but I would think that wouldn’t be possible if I have to bake the lighting into each room’s custom material?

If I use movable lights, would it be too expensive to place a multitude of these lights in each of the many rooms? I don’t know if it makes a difference, but the entire game would be indoors, and you would never be able to see more than 2 or 3 rooms at a time. And can a level lit solely by movable lights have the fidelity I’m looking for? (see layers of fear link)

Could anyone help me with the broad strokes that might point me in the right direction?

3

If you treat each room as its own level, and bake the lighting for each level (so baked lighting for each room), then load them in to a base persistent level that does all the logic to decide the layout of the house, then you can load all the rooms in to the base level with some padding around each one, add a ‘portal’ type render-to-texture camera on to each door exiting/entering each room.
That way, each room can have baked lighting, each room can connect to any other room through the portals, and you dont have to worry about the modularity because that all gets abstracted through the portals on each entry point of each room.