Lighting advice for sci-fi interior

Development Rendering
1

Hello!

I’ve been working on a modular sci-fi interior, and finally blocked out a level I’m happy with, and apart from running in to the ever so frequent lightmass problems of shadow seams and the like, the main issue I’m having now is I’m just not really sure how to go about lighting it.

There’s a continuous strip of white light running along each side of the walls, so ideally I want to bring that in to the equation, I’ve tried spaced point lights but they still create random patches of shadow or highlights when they overlap.

I should also note that the overhead lights will turn off and the only source of light will be the emissive paint marks on the floors and walls, creating a much darker more atmospheric environment, so I’m mostly wanting to run with dynamic lighting here.

I’m fairly new to UE4 lighting but I’ve read over the official documentation and still not entirely sure where to go with this one, so I was just curious as to whether the folk on the forums would have any advice or tips for me to try?

Any help would be greatly appreciated and here are some example images below:

http://i.imgur.com/olH5IAD.png
http://i.imgur.com/GT75C0V.png
http://i.imgur.com/XKxSDha.png

2

Something I’ve just encountered is a problem which I think may be causing some of my lighting issues. Whilst laying down additional walls, the lighting suddenly seemed to disappear once an object passed through a certain bounding box or max render distance or some sort.

http://i.imgur.com/jwG5pqi.png
http://i.imgur.com/gmzQiBa.png
http://imgur.com/H28Ixzu

The lighting is fine and uniform across both assets but suddenly one 10 unit movement and the lighting immediately changes and drops off, this is also in other areas of my level which creates a strange lighting barrier, does anyone know why this is or how to fix it?

3

You’re probably not going to be able to get a good dynamic representation of that type of light strip setup. UE4 supports the ability to bake emissive materials into lighting, but that’s static lighting.
If you were to use the Nvidia VXGI then you could do it since it supports emissive lighting, but that depends if you can afford the performance hit.

4

I probably should have thought of all this before hand! Thank you for the response though Darth, I’ll take a look in to it.