I remember back in UT 2004 you could render out lightmaps for your meshes in some other program and import them into the game. Is there any feature like that now where I can replace the lighting created in the engine with something created elsewhere?
Follow-up question, is it possible to export the lighting from my level (in any fort, really, I’m just kinda wondering what options are out there) and edit it any some fashion, and then re-import into the level?
It’s not really practical to do that. You’d lose all great features like dynamic shadow blending with static lightmaps, lighting probes for dynamic objects and other stuff.
I’d use Ambient Occlusion node in the material… No idea if it would work tho.
It is possible to export lightmap, then, say, overlay/blend it inside custom material node. Though I recommend never to work against engine, but utilize what engine gives you.
It’s not possible to render your lightmaps in another program, there’s some extra stuff that’s necessary for all of the lighting to work together, for example it needs extra maps that keep track of where the lights are coming from, and also the lights in the game level have to be pretty much exactly the same as the lights that the baked lighting is using so that things blend together.
I do it all the time for my arc vis work (not exporting from UE, but bringing in from other software). I stage and light everything in Maya and render in Vray baked color maps. When you bring them into Unreal, you dont need any lighting, because its baked in. The assets will look like they are raytraced rendered, which they are. Same with ambient occlusion and shadows. You can bake shadows into the floor - bring the floor in, put the assets (furniture) in the right place, and you have very nice ray traced shadows. (not dynamic obviously)