When I’ve built the lighting for the map, and I want to make the sun move slowly… the shadows remain stuck in place and do not move! What can be done about this?
If your light is moving you can’t use baked lighting. You have to set your light to movable and use dynamic shadows.
Changing the sun actor’s Mobility setting from “Stationary” to “Movable” solved the stuck shadows, thanks!
EDIT: is there any performance downside by making the sun movable and everything rendered with dynamic shadows? I imagine nothing comes free in this engine…
Yes, it takes more processing power and you don’t get as nice of shadows since it would take too much time to process things like light bouncing.
I kind of wish there was a deferred lighting approach. For slow-moving lights. With the sun moving so slowly the bounces could be calculated over many frames.
Maybe you got that sun almost in total real time lol. take a day and watch be sweet if u did. I am workin on a day planner not quite as long but long.
I see… is this why the open world games made in UE4 I’ve seen so far don’t look as good as the still/static archviz stuff?
It would still take too long
Yeah, though for exterior maps you can still get fairly good results because most of the lighting is direct lighting, you can get away with using things like Skylight or LPV to add a bit of faked bounce lighting to the shadow areas. For interiors it’s a different case because most of the lighting is indirect.
I see. Okay, I have a couple more questions:
- Is it practical to have no built lighting at all for exterior-based games?
- Is it possible to tell the engine to build lighting for only a small section of the world? Let’s say there’s a small house in the middle of the open field. I want the interiors of the house to have the benefits of built lighting.
Le Bump…
Most large open world type games don’t use baked lighting, because it would require a large amount of time to bake and it would take a large amount of disc space to store the lightmaps. Plus many of them don’t have the option because of day/night cycles so the lighting isn’t static.
For the stuff that you want to have built lighting you can just mark those items as Static and make sure you use Static or Stationary lights to light them up. It won’t work though if your sun light is dynamic though since that won’t mix correctly with static lighting.
Okay got it, thanks!