Lighting question for large scene

Hi all. I am new to UE4 and I am making a neighbourhood mock-up to scale. The square footage of the area is about 1250000 Sq.Ft. Most of the area will be just a grass landscape texture but there will be some simple spline roads and about 80 low poly homes.

THe issue I am having is in regards to the fencing of the area. I have a picket fence spline asset that I am using for each home. Just with 30 lots and the wooden fencing splines my fps drops to about 40 fps. I am trying to limit the lighting in regards to the fences as I dont need shadows or any expensive lighting for the many fences I plan on adding.

I have a large lightmass importance volume that covers the whole square block of my scene (not sure if this is correct).

The wooden fence spline are a lot for just 30 lots, there are more than 1000 actors in the scene and I am trying to figure out how to make each one a static light but I am unable to find the controls for that option as these are blueprint class instances of an asset i bought on the marketplace.

My pc specs are: gtx 770, i7-5820, 16 gb ram.

Any help is appreciated, thanks for time reading this mess. :slight_smile:

well baked lighting in that environment will be hard to get good quality since the resolution of the ground even at its highest probably won’t be high enough. Not sure about the frame rate drop near the fences. you said they were splines? I would not use splines but make those assets in a 3D package and import them, if thats the area thats slowing things down. Try to drop the number of actors in your scene, when you make the fences you can make them one long line that you manually connect.

well baked lighting in that environment will be hard to get good quality since the resolution of the ground even at its highest probably won’t be high enough. Not sure about the frame rate drop near the fences. you said they were splines? I would not use splines but make those assets in a 3D package and import them, if thats the area thats slowing things down. Try to drop the number of actors in your scene, when you make the fences you can make them one long line that you manually connect.
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Hi and thanks for the reply. I posted a similar question in another thread. So if I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that I get rid of all the spline actors and instead in Maya I create 1 large fence object that contains a lot of individual fences then re-import into UE4?

The objects are actually blueprint class from the fence spline asset in the marketplace.

Also in regards to the baked lighting for such a large ground landscape, any suggestions for the most efficient lighting choices? Should I just make the main light source static?

You could almost replace all the fences with simple planes and a masked fence texture applied to it. If the house are low poly anyway… and if you don’t have close up shots I guess it would work ok.

Or you could use level streaming. You bake each part (like sub-levels) individually and make one master level that will loads all other sub-levels.

The only thing to take into consideration is that a level cannot cast shadows on another level… so divide your stuff wisely.

Sort of you could make it one huge object but I think making the fences like 10-20 objects would be fine. Each fences is one long segment that you line up to another segment. Make sure the UV’s are good (shouldn’t have any non-prependicular rotations, so all 90 degrees) light baking will be easier to tune.
I don’ t know if you need to level stream for this scene, but you will want to break up the ground into more objects, so its not one huge mass (or use terrain which would be fine)