Lighting multiple rooms with both static and dynamic actors

Development Rendering
1

Hi,

as I am getting into UE4, the first challenge I’ve made for myself is to recreate functionality of Wolfenstein 3D game. I’ve already hit a roadblock in lighting the scene. Basically, the game level will be multiple separate rooms lit by many ceiling lamps:

1, If I make ceiling lamps static, I can bake the lighting down, which I want to do, but then movable actors are completely pitch black.

2, If I make ceiling lamps stationary, then I always run into the limit of 5 overlapping lights, so it is a no-go.

3, If I make ceiling lamps movable, then all is lit, but I lose the benefit of high detail and low-performance-taxing baked lighting

So my first idea was to assemble a custom lamp blueprint actor, which will always contain two lights - one static for baked lighting, and one movable, which excludes all the static meshes, but this would mean that I could not cast shadows from dynamic actors onto static meshes.

I am fairly sure this is a kind of scenario UE4 developers run into pretty much on daily basis, so I would like to ask what is a common workflow for making this work.

Thanks in advance.

2

I’d just use stationary all the time. Turn off shadows on stationary lights that aren’t so dominant in the scene.

3

Well, they all are :slight_smile: I mean imagine large hall with grid of 5*4 lamps, that’s 20 lamps, evenly distributed. If the enemy character moves around the room, it should cast shadows from every lamp he walks under. :expressionless: