Hey, so recently I started making a small game and I was wondering how should I light my level.
In the past I made some interiors or really small maps with some props but now I wanted to make it bigger and more detailed.
It will be a part of small city with couple of small buildings and one bigger (with interiors that player can explore) and intersection at night time. Something like in the picture below.
So there will be a lot of stationary lights (street lamps, signs and neons outside, lights in interiors) and a lot of objects.
I already tried baking but it takes really long time, consumes a lot of resources and have lightmap glitches in some places.
Dynamic lighting on the other hand is really performance heavy and doesn’t look really good in interiors. I haven’t tried Lumen but from what I understand it’s even more demanding.
So what’s the best way to light a level like that? Any tricks to do that? How is it made in modern games?
Any game made with Unreal is using one of those 3 options. Because those are the only options. Gears 5 for example used lightmaps, so did Borderlands. Fortnite uses fully dynamic lighting.
What games do with other engines varies widely. SVOGI is common for openworld games. But Unreal doesn’t have it.
If you can’t afford to use Lumen, and players can’t build or change the environment (like in Fortnite) then your best option is to use lightmaps.
