I’m wondering how to deal with this scenario. I have some wall panels, one of which will be able to open, the left one. (so is set to moveable) I want it to have similar appearance to the other wall panels in terms of the lighting, but of course the build is treating it differently.
If it is set to static, the lighting looks correct when it is baken, but then of course I can’t open it!
I also need to consider the correct lighting solution for the panel behind it, once it is opened.
There really isn’t one. You can apply a fake ambient occlusion texture to the moveable mesh to make it look a little more grounded in the scene - but things like this are exactly why high quality dynamic lighting solutions like Lumen are such a big deal.
You can force moveable objects to receive static lighting. In the Details panel, search for “Lightmap”. You should see an option named “Lightmap Type”. Change this from “Default” to “Force Surface”. Now rebuild your lighting.
The trick is to deal with the interior of the panel, as it would be pitch black. You could pull the door away from the wall, bake the lighting, and then move the door back into position via Blueprint upon BeginPlay. This is fine for a few objects, but quickly becomes cumbersome if you have quite a few of these objects.
I’m dealing with similar issues in my VR game, where I need to avoid dynamic lighting. We need the ability to bake static lighting, lock the lighting on specific objects like this one, and then be able to move it around without triggering another light build. Epic started to create this functionality, and it is still in the source code, but it is not exposed and unfinished. I briefly tried to finish it myself with no success. But if I ever do get it working, I plan to share it with everybody.
depends on the mesh and how connected all the geo is and how far the average neighbours are. if it’s all geo i’d bake the self AO into the vertex color or just the alpha byte.
shoud give you a decent look for highres static geo objects. for moving objects you gotta do the whole temporal surface cache on the fly shabang til it reaches a static state again. noisy lighting. it is what it is.
It’s honestly not nearly so much the overall lighting as the lack of ambient occlusion. If you bake an AO map to a texture or vertex colors and use it to darken the mesh, you’ll get a much more consistent and believable look.
This won’t help with ambient occlusion on the wall from the panel, but you could bake a decal to fake that part.
