Implementing a new lighting technique

Hi,

For my final undergrad project I am trying to add a new lighting technique to the engine, the lightcuts technique, and I am having serious trouble to find where to plug my modules in. I know that there are quite good lighting techniques inside UE4, but I am taking this more as a learning experience on the “inside” of the engine than as a real final product, so please, bear with me on this.

The technique basically requires a pre-procesisng pass to compute some data structures from the (point) light sources in the scene, and then a run-time evaluation for each point to shade. Right now, I am quite confident with the technique itself, but I have problems understanding where to plug my code at.

Now, I’ve been looking at the implementations of LightMass module, and I found it too “large” for my purposes, as I just want to create my data structures in pre-processing time and then use them in runtime. I do not plan to use swarm agents or anything like that. Just a bare implementation would suffice. I even considered implementing it like Ambient Cubemaps work, but the lack of real local shadowing pulls me back. So, please, if you could provide me any help about what to look for or where to start, I would be immensely grateful!

best

Fabi.-