I’m trying to create prefabs for my game using PLA and Level Instances. My game is targeted to mobile and I’d rather using baked light a much as possible. My idea was to use PLAs or LI to create prefabs with backed lightmaps that then I can spawn at runtime to compose my world procedurally but the lightmaps seem to discarded when creating them. Any idea if this is possible and if it does how? Otherwise any other alternatives? I guess last resort is to do that in a 3D app but I’d rather using Unreal as much as possible.
An alternative is to use rdBPtools to create your prefabs - when combined with rdInst you’ll get faster rendering than using either PLAs or Level Instances - they end up creating multiple draw calls per object - rdInst combines all the instances into one handler to reduce the number of draw calls to the minimum.
This means that you can bake inside Unreal using Lightmass or you need to do it in an external program? I think integrating that in Unreal simplifies the workflow and probably something that should be supported natively at some point. Lightmapped movable objects are pretty useful specially when working on procedural games that spawn assets at runtime.
Personally I try to keep away from building lighting - the same at work. It can be more performant than Lumen and the results can be nice, but it comes at a cost of extra memory/footprint needed (along with build times and inaccurate lighting between builds) .
Also for UE5, it can really help with performance in your projects if you follow the Epic guidelines and use their Lumen/Nanite/VSM workflow - at the beginning of your level it can look like it’s using more GPU/VRAM but as you add more and more objects you see it doesn’t actually drop much from there.
Were baked lights discarded immediately after baking, in the editor, or during runtime?
I am using PLA blueprints and all works well when baking with CPU. But GPU bakes end up in no lights baked in = black geometry.
When I drag in the same thing as Level, not BP, all bakes correctly on both. Kind of to be expected, as that is then a Level Instance. No clue how to make BP thing work too. Sort of makes the whole thing unusable.