Feature Request: Bring back vertex light baking

Development Rendering
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1

I’m in the process of converting a UDK game over to UE4 and I really miss being able to have lighting bake to the vertex rather than UV’s It’s perfect for many common game assets such as:

  1. Cables - these are often long and if they have bends in them they have good vertex distribution and density. If they often don’t have a good place to have a seam in the lighting especially if they are suspended in the air. If they are long then square lightmaps either mean having seams or wasted UV space. Baking the lighting to their vertices eliminates the seams.

  2. Grass blade patches (and other foliage) - with lightmaps you get lots of lost space due to having to have padding around each blade and if you have several grass patches with different sizes and number of grass blades you get inconsistent lightmap density across them. Using vertex baked lighting you get great consistency across all grass blade meshes whether a static mesh is a single blade or a large patch of grass blades they will all light the same. Grass and other foliage are often modeled with many vertices in order to move smoothly with wind and have smooth curves so they have often have plenty of vertices and good distribution.

  3. Generic Natural objects - ie - Rocks, Ice Chunks etc. These are often modeled in zbrush and end up having a relatively even vertex distribution some natural chaos particularly when using retopology tools like Decimation Master. Many of these types of assets are made to look good from all angles and made to be used at all rotations with no bottom etc. As such there is often no good place to have a lightmap seam that will work for all rotations and uses of a single rock. Using vertex baked lighting can be great in this case.

I hope you consider bringing this great feature of UDK / Unreal 3 back! Thank you, let me know if you would like any screenshots or asset files etc.

2

Just wondering, does it support vertex lighting in latest versions ?
I want to use it for cables as author mentioned.

3

As far as I can tell it still does not support vertex lighting. I still really wish they would add this feature. It would be very useful especially for performance limited mobile VR applications. Please upvote my post if you agree maybe we can get them to consider this.

4

Bump.

I am manually painting all vertices in the map for vertex lighting, but this is too tiring! Please bring back this feature.

1 Like
5

+1 for this… vertex lighting can be very useful

For large open levels, when you want a cheap solution in terms of shading and setup, vertex baked GI is great… you get fantastic gradients as the colors interpolate between vertices, faster baknig (less points to solve), faster setup (just write to vertices).

These days too, vertex count is increasing so the previous issue of vertex lighting aren’t as bad either.

Tricky objects like spikes on a fence, tree’s branch tips, complicated organic geometry don’t exhibit the unwrapping and UV edge issues either…

It was in UE3… why was this removed?

6

+1 for this… vertex lighting can be very useful

For large open levels, when you want a cheap solution in terms of shading and setup, vertex baked GI is great… you get fantastic gradients as the colors interpolate between vertices, faster baknig (less points to solve), faster setup (just write to vertices).

These days too, vertex count is increasing so the previous issue of vertex lighting aren’t as bad either.

Tricky objects like spikes on a fence, tree’s branch tips, complicated organic geometry don’t exhibit the unwrapping and UV edge issues either…

It was in UE3… why was this removed?

7

Still relevant, I would really like to see this technology in future updates.