I have a big Archviz project, 3 buildings, each with 3 floors to be rendered (offline rendering, as the final out will be on video format)
I’m thinking of setting all 3 buildings up and assign materials within UE4 and then bake lighting, as I need to make the videos showcasing interior exterior seamlessly.
, I did some testing and this is a small scene I tested out, it took almost an hour to build the lighting.
So I’m thinking it might take forever to build this big scene. Is there any way I could import each 3 storey buidlings separately, bake lighting and merge together? or any idea on how to achieve this goal would be a great help.
In your scene where you said it took an hour to build lighting, are you using a lightmass importance volume that encompasses your scene? If not, adding that can help speed light builds along.
Just to clarify on your next part when you want to build lighting for the others and then merge them. Do you mean have the assets merged as a single asset? This is not possible, but you can place them in a blueprint that or select them all > Right Click > Group to group all the actors together.
If you meant that you wanted to bake each building independently and then combine the maps this is possible as well and not very hard to setup.
Go to Windows > Levels > and here you will see the Persistent listed. This is the current map you have.
Next you’ll add new levels, one for each building presumably.
Do not place any buildings in the persistent level.
Now with each level for each building you can toggle the visibility via the Levels window and build lighting for each separately and then in the end just set them to all be visible and the lightmaps will be correct without the warning that lighting needs to be rebuilt in the top left.
The only problem I see happening here, if this is what you need to do, is that in order for your ground to receive any shadows from each mesh it has to be visible in each buildings level when you build the lights. The problem here is that since you would only build lighting for each independently, it’s only going to have the lighting from one of the buildings. If you build for another building map it will wipe any previous ground shadow information.
I hope this makes sense and if I’ve been way off the mark please let me know and I’ll see if I can provide a different example.
