[LIGHTING] Mixing Dynamic TOD Foliage with Interiors

Development Rendering
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So I’m doing some preliminary research on how I want to setup the lighting for a game I want to make. The game takes place on a set of floating islands, each ranging from probably 1-5 square kilometers (this is a rough guess, they will be large, but not MASSIVE). The islands have a lot of foliage, but they also have some indoor areas. I would like to use primarily static lighting indoors, as I’ll need a lot more lighting sources and a significant amount of geo complexity, but I would of course need a dynamic solution for dynamic TOD. My instinct is to have a similar setup to the Kite Demo using CSM for the closest 100 meters or so and Distance-Field Shadows beyond that, and then using static and stationary lights indoors, occasionally being affected by the light outside. Is this a valid setup? I was curious to get some feedback for Unreal Veterans (I’ve been using UE4 since beta, but it has been changing so much, I want to make sure I still have a good idea of what to do).

Thanks!!

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Hi. I’m facing the same question. Did you find a solution for this?

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Hello fragfest2012, and gerbilho,

Your logic is sound. This is a recommended workflow for using both indoor and outdoor lighting. Note : There is currently a bug with static lighting and foliage. Foliage painted past say 400-500 instance static meshes will derive it’s light source from only one light source. It is recommended to use dynamic lighting for your foliage, as with large foliage scenes, dynamic lighting can provide better performance as it will be a smaller calculation than that of your lighting cache. You could limit your static lighting to your indoor areas where the lights attenuation radius does not influence any of your instance static meshes.