Now this might be “as designed” but there’s not a whole lot of documentation on Lighting Scenarios so I’m not too sure.
I have three lighting scenarios pulled into a persistent level.
Each of these contains a directional light and Skylight that samples a Skydome static mesh.
The static mesh sky dome is contained in each lighting scenario because it is a different color to reflect different times of day so it affects the skylight capture.
In theory I should be able to turn on all the scenarios, bake lighting, and it runs through and individual bakes each scenario. This does happen but the result is different than if i turn on and bake each individually.
It seems there is something from the other scenarios getting mixed in with the bakes. One scenario will bake correctly but the others will be a bit mixed.
I reproduced this by
- creating a scene with a plane and some basic geometry.
- Added a sub level containing a skylight and a static mesh for a skydome - half sphere
- Saved out two extra sub levels from the initial sub level and changed the color of the emissive attached to the skydome
- Marked all the sublevels as Lighting Scenarios
- turned all sub levels on and baked.
- Then turned all off and individually bake on and baked as well
So it really seems to be just sampling the SkyDome from Scenario B. I guess non-lights don’t get turned off for each bake? If I adjust the intensity of each skylight I get a different intensity in each - so it is using different SkyLights - but the color is still the sample from B.
I also had a similar though less extreme results by getting rid of the skylight and switching the skydomes to use emissive for static lighting.
I do get MapCheck errors about having multiple skylights in a level when I start the bake but I figured that’s natural since I do have them all turned on to bake one after the other and that at time of actual baking there would be only one.
When I used only directional lights for the scenarios I couldn’t see any difference between baking the scenarios all at once or individually. Just when I used Sky Lights or emmisive static meshes.
I also tried making the SkyDome meshes “Dynamic” and setting them to “Light as Static” since maybe the system was trying to toggle the visibility and couldn’t because they were marked “Static” but the result was the same.
It’s a slight though not terrible inconvenience to have to bake them all individually but I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the current implementation of the feature or a bug.