I really like soft GI from stationary sky light and it possible to control for day-night cycle, however DFAO is amazing too.
Stationary GI and DFAO does not interfere with each other, but I can’t have 2 different sky lights in the scene. Is there any way to have both?
There’s no way to do this out of the box, but you could modify the Lightmass export to compute GI for movable skylights as well (basically treat them as Stationary), then it would compute GI for them. The actual rendering of the 2 don’t conflict (lightmaps for GI vs dynamic skylight).
Another thing you might consider is to disable ‘lower hemisphere is black’ on the skylight and then paint some ground color into the bottom of the skylight cubemap. This is kindof like poor man’s GI, but can be effective especially in outdoor areas where the lack of shadowing on the skylight bounce won’t be noticeable.
Sorry, I think I didn’t get it… By “modify the Lightmass export to compute GI for movable skylights” you mean modify it’s code from source code? I’m also looking for a way to use DFAO combined with Lightmass. I think it would helps to blend movable meshes in a static ambient with lightmass.
I believe Dan means that yes, you have to modify source code of the Lightmass tool (unless that option is exposed as a variable in LightmassSettings.ini)
DFAO isn’t a dynamic-only effect I think (not toyed with it yet), You can use it with any light type.
It’s actually possible to calculate the lightmass with SkyLight set to Static and then change it to Movable after that to layer DFAO up lightmaps. The problem is that Movable skylight adds light to the scene, you can’t just use the DFAO like if it was replacing the ordinary dynamic AO. It would be nice to have this option, but I don’t know if it is actually possible.