Even after trying to rebuild this area from scratch, and even updating my engine, getting rid of other static lights, it still does not fix it. Ive duplicated working lights and actors from other areas and it doesnt work, nor does making new lights elsewhere. As if something along that way turned off the ability to make new ones. Is there something i might have toggled somewhere down the line that affected this? the old baked lighting still works, but the making of new ones dont.
The actors are indeed moveable. The problem is, that in a certain section of the map, static Point lights dont register on the actors. Just the Sky and Directional lights do, which are ALSO static. Everywhere else in the map do static Point lights affect the actors, as with the other lights. Even with duplication of all actors and lights into this problem area, the problem persists. Taking them out of the area, they work. I cant possibly fathom what the issue is here.
Moveable meshes need to sample static lighting from the volumetric lightmap, and it stores lighting in a very sparse grid of probes, by default they’re spaced 2 meters apart. This means they’re prone to leaking lighting through walls and ceilings, and they can’t capture small lights or shadows. Also, AFAIK, they’re stored as spherical harmonics so ringing artifacts can occur.
Most likely you’re dealing with some kind of leaking, this is probably why it looks fine in some regions but not others. If you pull up the Volumetric Lightmap visualizer you might get a better idea of what’s going on.
If that’s the issue, you can try reducing the volumetric lightmap detail size in the World Settings, but the memory cost of the VLM scales cubicly so you’ll want to be careful how far you reduce it. For example going from a spacing of 2 meters to 1 meter would result in (approximately) 3x increase in GPU memory cost.
You should also make sure your lightmass importance volume is covering that portion of the map, and that you have sufficient coverage from reflection captures (unless your materials are fully rough, in which case disregard).
Also worth noting that Static Lighting support is basically falling apart in Unreal and there have been numerous bugs with it in every version of UE5 including one where the VLM just should not build: Volumetric Lightmaps no longer work in 5.5 - #9 by fr-coder
So depending on your version and how you’re building the lighting, it could simply be a bug.
I wasnt even aware VLM even existed, and it was just at the cut off of the VLM. Thats why i couldnt even fathom why it wasnt working, i didnt even know VLM existed. Thank you, i realize im gonna have to rework how my world works, or is built, to make it work how i want.
I like UE5 for ease of use with the nodes, healthy community/store, and stuff. But, UE5 seems to be phasing out old paradigms in favor super high-fidelity, ray tracing, high poly stuff which is antithetical to what i want to do. I might start eyeing Godot when i finish this project, if i can find a decent visual scripting thing, or just suck it up and actually learn a language.
