forested landscape and seeing Lumen GI

Development Asset Creation
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I’m prototyping a large, forested landscape and seeing Lumen GI popping and light leaks at a distance. What’s your go-to strategy for stabilizing global illumination in world-partitioned maps without resorting to full light baking?

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Your hybrid Lumen/Lightmass strategy is on point – it’s a best-of-both-worlds approach I’ve grown to love. Just be ready to iterate on quality settings and possibly invest some time in tooling to manage the complexity. The results are worth it when you walk through a huge world with stable lighting in the distance and reactive lighting up close. 😃

I’m curious, how are others handling Lumen in large scenes or complex levels? Anyone else mixing techniques or using in-editor tools to streamline the workflow? Would love to hear your experiences or any other tips you’ve discovered! Let’s keep this thread going and learn from each other’s workflows.

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Hey @WonderWoman, if you’re ready to streamline everything, check out our plugin : Asset Optics **. Here’s how it tackles each pain point:

  1. In-Editor Task Placement: Drop tasks right where the issue lives—whether it’s a light-leak in Cell_A2 or a GI pop-in near the player start. No more juggling spreadsheets or sticky actors.
  2. Real-Time Sync & Comments: Every task, comment, and screenshot syncs instantly to your team’s web board. Your lighting lead sees updates mid-session, and your scripter can reply with a Blueprint snippet without leaving UE.
  3. Custom Labels & Filtering: Tag tasks by “Lighting,” “Blueprints,” or even by streaming cell. Each of your four teammates gets a filtered view in-editor, while you still have a master overview on the web.
  4. Multi-User Project Sharing: Spin up sub-workspaces for each discipline (world-building, lighting, QA) under one master project. Everyone’s working in the same map, but with their own task queues.
  5. Screenshot & Asset Links: Attach Lumen debug snapshots or reference meshes directly to tasks. Teammates click the task and teleport to the exact camera view or asset causing hiccups.
  6. Offline Caching & Conflict Resolution: Work on location? Edits queue locally and merge conflict-free once you’re back online—no lost notes or duplicate tasks.

We’ve cut our cross-discipline hand-off overhead by over 50%, and everyone stays in the editor. Give it a spin here Asset Optics – Next-Gen Asset Management | Fab, and let me know how it fits into your Lumen/Lightmass pipeline! Any questions or feature ideas, drop them here—would love to hear your thoughts.

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I’ve had luck using a hybrid approach: use Lumen for close-range dynamic objects, but bake indirect lighting on distant landscape sections with high-res Lightmass cards. Also bump up “Final Gather Quality” and enable Hardware Ray Tracing if your GPU supports it to smooth out those leaks.