Hi, switching off real-time rendering (ctrl+r) doesn’t seem to actually switch it off. Is there a way I can edit my scene without constantly burdening GPU with lighting. Using the unlit viewport seemingly still renders lighting in the background. What I’d like is to toggle between different viewports - lit, unlit, wirefame etc - and for the graphics card to understand. I tried FreezeRendering console command but it kills originally off-screen geometry. Any ideas? Thanks
The engine HAS to render frames while you’re editing, otherwise you won’t be able to see what you’re doing 
If you want to move cube A 100 units to the left, how can you do that without seeing it?
It basically does. Rendering is stopped until you move the camera. I’m not sure what you’re trying to do but I’m pretty sure “disabling realtime rendering” is not what you want…
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Perhaps he means texture baking?
I think unreal only has lightmap baking.
You would need to render out textures offline for instance in v-ray to do that.
Then you can turn off the lights and have less realtime calculations.
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I think the OP is referring to
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So it basically just limits updates for materials, components, skeletal meshes and particles. Lighting will always need to be calculated without bakes.
Hey, thanks for reply. In other software switching to a wireframe or shaded viewport is far less intense on the graphics card - I can still see what I’m doing but without simulation of real world lighting. But in unreal it doesn’t seem to matter - lit, unlit or wireframe - lumen still calculates indirect light bouncing in the background. Ideally the unlit viewport would give my computer a break and stop calculating realistic lighting.
Not too dissimilar to pre-lumen times I guess. Is there a lumen on/off switch? Cheers
EDIT: Perhaps ctrl-R is actually working it’s just not effecting my fan noise. Pretty new to unreal. : )
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In wireframe, there is no lighting, or Lumen
You can switch Lumen off with the console command
r.DynamicGlobalIlluminationMethod 0
a 1 switches it back on again.
Thanks for this. I’m definitely missing something. Why does a lit viewport look identical regardless if realtime or not? For example, a cube on a plane blocks all light directly beneath it. If I then switch off realtime and move the cube surely I should see a darkened footprint of where it was? Then switching realtime back on should re-calculate the lighting and remove the darkened area?
You’re missing the point, I think.
With realtime on, the editor is almost running like the game. IE, the whole frame is being calculated 120 times per second.
With realtime off, if you don’t change anything, the editor doesn’t redraw the picture. It’s just a static picture, sitting there. But, if you change something, move something, change material params etc, it will redraw the frame.
Does it make sense?
So with your example, when you move the cube, the editor recalculates the image, and you see the shadow move. You can’t have it drawing nothing, because then you can’t move the cube either
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Also, if you just want to not burden the GPU, just reduce the quality in Settings → Engine Scalability Settings.
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Think I’m just used to rhino/3ds max etc - where no viewports are ‘rendered’ (as such) 'til I hit the render button. At which time accurate, real-world lighting is calculated.
Whereas lumen always calculates real-world lighting regardless of viewport or realtime toggle whenever I edit geometry/move camera - which I don’t always want.
Yes, the way UE works is not the same as Rhino.
You can go back to the old method of waiting hours for static lighting to build, if you want. But why would you want to?
Even then, the engine will still show you shadows while you are working on the level, just not as high quality.
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Something you could try, is turning off shadows on the directional light. That might be quite good
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There are artists that are used to working on environments in the unlit view. There’s various debug views, see if any of those work better for you. Or you could create an Editor Utility Widget that switches off/on rendering features to your preferences.
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Cheers, I’ll give this a go. Do we still have to bake lighting before packaging project btw? Wondering how it works for gamers - as they’ll not have unreal.
You only have to bake light if you’re using static lighting in your project
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As I’m in archviz pretty much all lights will be static - so good to know. Cheers.
Static is a specific term. If your lights are static ( or stationary ), you can’t really see what the scene will be like until you build light.
The default, since Lumen, is dynamic ( moveable ) lights.
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Shouldn’t be using static lights at all with Lumen unless you know what you’re doing.
Lumen disables lightmaps so if you have Lumen enabled, as soon as you build your lights, all your static lights will disappear.