We’re evaluating Unreal and wanted to know something specific about the lightmap generation.
We are creating a world that can be changed dynamically by the end-user. So it would make sense for the end-user to be able to initiate the generation of the lightmaps. Let’s assume the user doesn’t care if the baking takes some time. Is there a way to do this through API outside of the editor since the user won’t have the editor once we ship?
Thanks
I will add to this that this isn’t a game, but some architectural visualization software, which is why the user doesn’t care if the baking takes time. We just need a way to bake lighting once the user has modified the world.
The light baking system does not get included into the built product so there’s no way to build lighting that way. But-what might work for you is to use a system like VXGI, which can do pretty good results. I would disable it during the scene setup and then when the user wants to render an image or animation you could enable it with high settings and let it do its thing.
The Unreal Engine EULA forbids any form of integration of editor tools like Lightmass into your shipping builds, unless you develop your own lightmap baking system.