I’m learning UE4 and one of my clients asked if I could take one of our previous interiors and “bake” the lighting into the maps so he has a model with no lights in it but one in which it looks like the lights are there.
When I Export FBX out of UE4, I get the diffuse textures and it looks good but the lighting is not "baked’ into the maps on the walls and floors. I can certainly bake using Flatiron in Max and achieve this but I’ve rebuilt our interior in UE4 and we really like how it looks.
Since Building and Baking are a lightmass thing in UE4, it’s not the same as baking illumination into diffuse maps in Max and when i search I come up empty on how to do it from within UE4.
How do I bake the light information “into” the maps for my interior scene so that I have a model with absolutely no lights in it but it still looks like the lights are there?
UE4 can do that sort of, that’s what the Lightmass is for, it’s just that the lightmaps are stored in a separate image and are composited with the material of the object which is a bit more ideal since you can still tile textures in your material without having to use super high resolution textures.
You just need to set your lights to Static rather than Stationary or Movable.
Besides that, your meshes need to be setup for lightmaps: Unwrapping UVs for Lightmaps | Unreal Engine Documentation
If you haven’t been messing with lightmaps, then it might have tried to auto-generate some for you but it does a bad job, best option is to do it yourself for each mesh. You just need to make sure that the UV channel that you’ve created for your lightmaps is the one that is set to be used for lightmaps, and you’ll need to adjust the lightmap resolution to be high enough for each mesh, the default is 64 x 64 pixels.
Thanks @darthviper107 - I’m just seeing that I forgot to respond to this for over 6-months, but what you said is right on. I’ve figured it out and your info was helpful. Thank you.
Is it possible to bake the light into a model, then import that model into another project without the need to build the light again. For exxample bake the light on to a house model then import the house into aother scene and build a residential complex pasting that model several times, without another light build?
What was the solution for this? I too now need to bake lighting information onto the textures then export that out of unreal. It’s driving me quite crazy as I swear it was doable few years back.