Forgive my ignorance. Exteriors without lightmaps and quality?

Can you do exteriors without lightmaps at the same quality as with lightmaps and if so how?

There’s no way to get the same quality as light maps with dynamic lighting. VXGI is typically the best dynamic lighting solution for arch viz, but I haven’t seen anyone use it for exteriors yet. Distance Field GI and Height Field GI might be your best option, they were introduced with the Kite cinematic, but they aren’t a refined solution, it’s still a beta feature that manually has to be enabled.

Bummer. Thanks for the reply. :confused:

It’s because dynamic lights in ue4 don’t provide indirect illumination (or G.I) but only direct lighting. The skylight can ‘‘fake’’ G.I to some extent. Without it the shadows would be pitch black.
If you only have an exterior scene to do, you should be able to only use movable directional light + movable skylight and use a bit of ambient occlusion to get some sort of contact shadows.
You can raise the resolution of the dynamic shadows much higher than their default value too. It still doesn’t looks as good as a baked scene unfortunately.

Even if vxgi is doing G.I in real-time, imo it’s not precise enough to give good shadows. It’s good for games not arch-viz.

Still have problems with uv unwrapping RI3DVIZ?

Thanks man. I built a model in Sketchup for a client and they want a SU fly around, I thought if it was easy I’d bang it out in UE4 for them. I didn’t build the model with UE4 in mind so it’s kind of a mess.

And, yes and no for uving. I’m too busy to learn 3ds Max right now so I’m still using SU and Blender. Some things I can unwrap fine others not so much.

If you don’t care too much about performance you can use VXGI and turn up the quality

Okay thanks, not sure I can get that up and running right now but good to know!