Have used UDK before but am new to UE4. Honestly I thought UE4 had fully integrated real-time GI. Did not do much research into it before I subscribed. I know I can unsubscribe if I am unhappy but I still want to try it out and $20 is incredibly cheap for an engine like this. More like super incredibly cheap:). I have only tried UE4 on my laptop, which is horribly old, so far and I noticed you still have to bake the scene if you made a minor change. This is why I could not stand using UDK. Is there any way to disable the need to bake. I am currently using Unity indie and while it barely has any features it does have the ability to let you skip the baking process. I NEVER bake. Do not have time to waste and let my computer bake for a day.
I am not planning on creating a game(for now) but am planning on creating art and selling it on the Marketplace. Am currently making stuff to sell on the Unity Asset Store. So I am still going to work in Unity but would love to work in UE4 too. So long story/question short is there a way to use ambient light instead of having to bake?
Thanks
Select all the lights in your scene and set them to dynamic rather than static or stationary.
But if you create 3D models and you don’t have your objects ready to be lightmapped, you’ll have several unhappy customers. Just be advised. Not saying you have to constantly bake every day but you will need to do it before you sell the assets just to make sure they’re actually working and don’t have ugly shadowing when they’re baked onto.
One of the most common complaints on these forums is that UE4 doesn’t handle automatic Lightmap UVs well. While Epic have gone into detail on how and when they plan to fix that, you’re not likely to see a tool that can handle it as well as a professional.
Cool. I understand that. All my models that I have been working on already have UV2 set up. If UE4 reads Blender models second UVs it should work great. I will do a nice bake for the demo scenes when everything is ready. Just to set it up I like to walk through it a lot. Thank you for the info. Whenever I get to download it on my desktop I will try it out.
If you’ve not seen the Submission guidelines this would be a good place to check out.
Veovis Muad’dib makes a good point that UV lightmaps are a topic that comes up a lot. These are required for assets being sold on the Marketplace and should be setup accordingly. While there are plans to improve the automatic lightmap process within UE4 you will still have the most control by making your own UV layouts for lightmaps.
For your scene, the only way not to deal with baking lighting anytime you move an object is to make sure any lights in your scene are set to movable.
Thanks. UV lightmaps just use the UV2 setup in the 3D app right? Just want to make sure.
A little off topic but for leaves would it work to have a two-sided leaf share the same space in a lightmap UV? So both sides of the leaf have the same lightmapped data.
Yes, you create them in your 3d program ->
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Thank you for the links. Probably will be tomorrow but I will be able to import my models and check if it is using the lightmap UVs correctly. I will also try out the dynamic lighting. Thanks guys for the help. Will post when I try it out. Will post a few screenshots too.
By the way, Unity has the same requirement, it just doesn’t tell you to rebuild your lighting.