Light baking - reflections not working in play, static/stationary point lights issue and god rays

Hello everyone,

I have three issues that I’ve been struggling with in UE4.27.1 and I’m at a complete loss and hope you can help me.

Question 1 - reflections

Here’s a scene I’m working on.
When I’ve baked everything, there’s a huge difference in my reflections between the viewport and when I press “play”.
The difference is especially noticable on the table in the bottom right, and the lamps on the wall.

  • I have three sphere reflection spheres spread throughout the scene.
  • There’s only one level and the default streaming method is set to “always loaded”
  • The reflections are baked
  • All the lights in the scene are set to “stationary” or “static”. Nothing is set to “moveable”.

I feel like I’ve read through the entirety of google in search of an answer but I really can’t figure it out. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Question 2 - stationary/static light issue

I’ve got my lamp shades set to “subsurface” shading model.
When I’ve baked the scene with the point lights set to “stationary”, the subsurface shader on the lamp shade doesn’t work. But if I switch to “static”, it works like I want:

The same is true for if I bake the scene with my point lights set to “static” and then switch to “stationary” after the bake.

However, now I get a message that “lighting needs to be rebuilt”. This means that I can’t get this subsurface effect from baking the light. What’s the deal here?

Question 3 - god rays

The volumetric god rays look bad after my bake, when my directional light is set to stationary.

If I switch the directional light to “movable” after the bake, the god rays act more like you expect. But now the scene is messed up.

Here’s my lightmass settings, and I’m baking on “production”:

I know you used to be able to “hack” your way around it, using two directional lights with one set to moveable and the other to stationary, but that doesn’t work on this version of UE4.
Does anyone know a way around this?

Thanks in advance!

A little update. I solved the reflection issues I had by creating a new level, selecting everything in the world outliner and then moving everything onto the new level. Somehow, this fixed the issue.
Before that, everything was in the “persistent” level. So it must have been a bug of some sort.

I still haven’t fixed the other two issues, but at least I fixed the first one in case any one else runs into the same problem.

Another update. The god rays look good if you put the static lighting level scale in world settings to 0,1 .