Light bleeding effect - follow-up problem

Development Rendering
1

Hi there,

the problem with light bleeding through walls has been thoroughly discussed, so fear not - I won’t bring this up once more. But I am experiencing a follow-up problem after resolving the bleeding problem:

As is generally known, you can prevent bleeding by using static lights and two-sided meshes, or set them as two-sided. This works fine, but what I experience is that static lights do not reflect metalic surfaces in my levels. I tried this out with the chair from Starter Content, which is showing a black frame instead of a metalic one under static lights. I am using UE 4.10.

Is there a way to force metalic reflection with static lights?

2

Static lights are only stored within lightmaps, so whatever will be reflected will be in the lightmaps.

3

This does not explain why metallic surfaces do not reflect with static lights. Isn’t there a way to fix this?

4

If there’s nothing that the static light is emmitting light onto, then there’s nothing for the metallic to reflect, you would need either a surface the light is shining on, or an object like a lightbulb with an emissive material. Otherwise you need to use a stationary light.