I am trying to make a atmospheric horror game. I want to use Lumen to make the lighting feel good and realistic, however the performance overhead is not worth it for my project. Is there any tool out there that can bake lighting generated by Lumen (not reflections since that’s obviously not possible) so i can get the benefits of Lumen without the performance overhead. I am ready to make some sacrifices if needed
Just bake the lighting.. use GPU light bake as that very closely matches Lumen as it uses GPU raytrace render path. The hard part is not the light baking it’s dealing with all the lightmap resolution and lightmap uvs on your meshes. You can absolutely take the same scene, make all the lights static, bake lighting with GPU, bake reflections or use Lumen reflections and get a result that looks very similar. I think it’s a great workflow to do all the lighting with Lumen for speed and iterations and then bake the result down. Of course it sounds simple but light baking is a whole other world of pain for the reasons above. GPU light baking at least simplifies the process as there are fewer parameters to worry about and it’s much much faster. Good luck
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Thanks! I have one small question about GPU Lightmass after learning a bit about it
The documentation says “Ray Traced Shadows and Ray Traced Skylight are not needed for GPU Lightmass to function. Leave these features disabled unless you need them for your project.”
Does this mean that GPU Lightmass does support them but they are optional, or it doesn’t and it wont be baked.
raytraced shadows are a realtime feature. gpu lightmass doesn’t need it to function. i don’t know what raytraced skylight is. the regular sky light will provide ambient light and shadows for the bake.