I’m trying to make a lantern. I could choose to make a lantern mesh and a static light together in a blueprint or I can use emissive map without real light. I have vague memory about that emissive map has better performance than real lights. Is that true? if so, how much difference between them?
Hi, if you use static lightning, then AFAIK it makes absolutely no difference. Static lightning means it will get baked into lightmaps, the actual lights won’t exist in the game anymore. If you mean the time it takes to bake lightning or the difference in quality, then I don’t know which one will be faster / better…
Hi, chrudimer, thanks for your answer. If so then I’m going to choose static light. But there’s another problem which is if I choose using static light. I may have to use Blueprint to put light and mesh together and place around, which is different from just placing static mesh. If a scene has a lot of objects like this we say, then will it make a big difference on performance? To be specific, will a lot of Blueprints cost more draw calls than static meshes?
Every static mesh you place in the world is also an actor or “blueprint” if you want to call them that way =)
So there is no difference. Everything you place into the world will be an actor, every particle system, every sound, every light, every mesh, … You should just remember to disable tick on your actors if you don’t need. If you create a new actor then tick will be enabled by default. Static mesh actors (which ofc inherit from Actor) have it disabled.
You can let your blueprint inherit from static mesh and then only add the light to it. That shouldn’t make any difference on performance compared to placing one static mesh and one light seperately. As for autoinstancing AFAIK you always get that, so you could also just inherit directly from actor and add a static mesh component and a light to it. Just remember to disable tick on the actor and the components.
thanks! appreciate your help.