I’m working on an open-world game with a persistent day/night cycle which necessitates that all core lighting be dynamic- decorative and mood stuff can be baked in, but the stuff that actually lights the scene and allows the player to see needs to change based on the time of day.
Accomplishing the outdoors lighting is pretty trivial: movable skylight + directional light gives a very good effect, and as long as you spend enough time tuning it, you can get super-acceptable results. The problem, which I know is a recurring issue in UE4, is outdoor-indoor transitions. Since the directional light is dynamic I can’t rely on bounces and scattering to spread light inside, and since it’s a third-person game I can’t really put giant, super-diffuse point lights in every room, because they’ll reflect off of the characters in a weird way that makes it obvious.
So is there an established workflow I’m missing here? The obvious answer seems like it would be to bake stationary lights on the interiors, but there are tons of subtle details I’d like to encode in the interior lights, like making early mornings subtly pink and evenings orange, that won’t work if I’m only able to bake a single setup into each room.