I have a level which is an outdoor 4Km x 4Km level set in a desert valley surrounded by hills and I’m having problems trying to light it without getting a bazillion warnings from Lightmass. This brings up some questions:
Lightmass complains there is no Lighmass Importance Volume. Do you still use one on large open areas?
I have never been able to use grass without getting errors that the lightmap is too large. I’m using a Grass Node inside the landscape shader to place the grass. The grass isn’t nearly as dense as some levels I’ve seen, so I don’t get why this is causing issues.
The level uses dynamic lighting for the sun and there are currently no other lights in the level.
I would love to ditch building lighting completely, but at some point there’s going to be some static lighting for interior spaces that will eventually be added to the level.
OK, I think I got things sorted out by using level streaming. I have my outdoor stuff as the main level and the stuff that gets static lighting moved to sub-levels so I can build the lighting separately. This seems to work just fine. However, my static lit sub-level keeps giving me this error during the light builds:
InstancedFoliageActor_0 Instanced meshes don’t yet support unique static lighting for each LOD. Lighting on LOD 1+ may be incorrect unless lightmap UVs are the same for all LODs.
This is odd because there is no landscape actor and there is no foliage in the level. The static lit level was made by duplicating the original level and deleting the landscape and everything else that used dynamic lighting. I suspect this might be a bug.