Can I exclude certain lit static or stationary objects from affecting volume light samples?

[Poet_11 (William K)]

@anonymous_user_f2b8b290

We don’t intend to expose any controls that can cause the surface lightmaps and volumetric lightmaps to diverge. They should be storing the same thing - baked lighting at a point in space or a point on a surface.

On the technical side, it’s very difficult and inefficient to track where light came from in a global illumination solver like Lightmass, which would be required for lighting channels or what you are requesting. Once light bounces a few times it’s just light, could have come from anywhere.

Thank you for taking the time to pitch in.

I will take your info into consideration.

In case it interests you, the reason why i asked is because of the following:

Usually we would be lighting certain environments with many bounce area lights to create the color pallete we need in the scene, sometimes these lights are small and directed at a certain object. In the offline renders we are able to tell the renderer to simply hide the light source and exclude them when we put the characters in. In unreal we have to fake the area light by creating bounce lights with boxes, while the bounce works very well in the scene unfortunately it also affects the path of where the character would be walking sometimes (Hence affecting the Volume samples there). We can always take more care in placing these lights (for instance further away) but this can potentially limit art direction in certain places where we need them closer to the ground or around corners.

Thanks again though.