Hello Everyone, I am pretty new to this forum, so if these questions are already explained in this forum I would appreciate your guidance to find them, I could not find a straight answer using the search tool.
So I am trying to use Unreal to create VR presentations for Arch Viz.
I have this medium-large project, they are two building on a college campus, the idea is to showcase the outside campus and also some interiors offices and classrooms.
I was planning to divide the VR experience in to Scenes to "save resources’ on the machine but then I was wondering if Unreal could be adjusted to just ‘render’ close by areas as the person walk around the campus, I know LODs could help in this case but my specific question goes with respect to Distance Field Shadows or Cascade Shadows map. How could I use those to improve my FPS or baking all lighting should be enough?
Also, I noticed in some games the geometry load dynamically as you get closer to them, is that only managed by LODs?? or it has another name?Sorry for the ■■■ questions, but you know ‘Traditional’ Arch Viz works in a different way and I am trying to train my self to think more like a game developer.
Thank you.
The engine already has some optimizations for lighting based on distance and occlusion, the issue is if you use baked lighting then it has to load all of the data into memory at once so if you have a lot of geometry/textures/high resolution lightmaps then it can fill that up and take a long time to render the lighting. That’s why big open-world games use dynamic lights because it wouldn’t be possible to bake it otherwise.
Thank you for the input, I appreciate.
Now for the long run, I will be always building project that shows exteriors and interiors. In that case, should I divide the exterior and interiors into separated levels?? or I can mix baked lighting and dynamic lighting for exteriors?? I noticed that after baking light, if I add any object the engine ask me to rebake the lighting.
If you have something that you don’t want to use baked lighting then change the object to Movable. For lights, static lights will only affect static objects, stationary lights will cast dynamic shadows for dynamic objects and use precomputed lighting for static objects. However, you can only have 4 stationary lights overlapping an area (because of how the precomputed lighting is stored it can only store 4 sets of shadows).