I’m a beginner in Unreal, and trying to understand the best workflow for archviz.
Typically, my projects involve bringing in architecture models of buildings from 3DS Max with millions of polygons/objects.
I prefer to add materials within Unreal, instead of trying to import from datasmith or manually.
Lumen is so desirable for many reasons, but my research tells me that baked lighting is better for archviz.
Here are the main differences as far as I understand them:
Lumen:
PROS
- Way faster to light a scene from scratch in real time without waiting around during “build lighting”
- Very straightforward to import a scene from 3DS max using Datasmith
CONS
- Lower quality- (and mirror reflections are currently impossible to achieve)
- Requires higher hardware performance (lower FPS for packaged projects on slower machines, unideal for Pixelstreaming)
Baked Lighting:
PROS
- Higher quality lighting + accurate reflections
- Does Not require high spec hardware (great FPS for packaged projects on slow machines and ideal for pixelstreaming)
CONS
- Building lighting from scratch is not real time, takes a long time to build lighting. GPU light building crashes often.
- Not a straightforward process of importing from 3DS Max and manually adjusting lightmaps.
Essentially, using lumen is ideal as it works so easily to set up lighting with datasmith imports from 3ds Max right away.
On my machine with a RTX 3080, my scenes run smoothly with decent FPS once I have fully developed them with materials and lighting. The issue is that I need our packaged projects to run smoothly on clients lower end machines, or through pixel streaming, and the FPS is just so bad. I can deal with the loss of quality from Lumen for reflections, but I need things to run smoothly…
Lightmaps to me just seem so nuanced and complicated, but If baking the light is the only answer to this issue- I need to understand if this is even possible with the scale of the scenes I work with.
For my 3Ds Max models to bake correctly in UE5, what exactly is it that needs to be done in order for the datasmith imports to work? Going in manually to millions of different objects to adjust the lightmaps for these huge building models just is not a feasible option. Is there an automated process for this?
Feeling overwhelmed, and would much appreciate any clarity that could be given to me on this topic!