In my game the levels are procedurally generated so I can’t do any light map baking or anything. However I also miss out on reflections making it nearly impossible to do good looking metal.
I realize the offline baking probably does some pretty heavy work to compute the reflections with a higher quality. I wonder though, if I can at run time after my level is done generating, trigger an update of all reflection capture actors to just render a simple cube map. It wouldn’t have reflections of reflections or probably look even as good, but at least my metallic materials won’t be reflecting blackness, making them completely useless.
I’d probably avoid making my metals shiny with 1.0 to still force the reflections to be a bit hazy. It’s better than not being able to use metallic surfaces at all right now.
It actually doesn’t take much time–it’s not a real time option, but it would only take seconds to do.
Problem is though, that function is not part of the cooked game, so it can’t do it even if you’re willing to add some time to the loading process of the game.
if you do it just once you can do a scene capture actor and use the rendered cubemap, but then you need to use them in conjunction with either bound post processes with an ambient cubemap (not sure about reflections) or generating skylights that turn on and off based on players position using collision volumes.
that’s the first thing that comes to mind though, you may require further investigation.
I am also greatly interested in knowing a solution to this problem, for mostly the same exact reason.
Imagine if you have a fully procedural environment, one generated via blueprint as in some of the tutorial videos. Once generated: it’s a static environment, not requiring constant updates of the reflection captures: the reflection environments would only need one update, and that update would happen before the player even starts playing.
There has got to be some sort of solution to this, or at least a modification to the engine to allow capture updates in runtime. the ‘Recapture Sky’ seems to only work on skylights, which is great for open, unvaried environments, but as soon as an environment has some sort of locality, like rooms or cooridoors, it is quite useless.