I got tired of using bounce cards or relying on the low sample rate of emissive materials to make up simple rectangular area lights for my scenes. So, instead of figuring out how to make it through the engine source and putting in a custom light shape, I made a quick blueprint that should be good enough for most cases. I’m pretty happy with the results:
In short, it’s a blueprint that makes an array of spot lights with all the functionality that I at least saw myself using for something like this. I exposed all the properties I thought would be useful to the blueprint publicly, so it can be edited per instance.
The most important property when editing this is probably going to be the Quality setting. Lower numbers increase the amount of spot light instances, giving it up to 1 light per cm if set to 1. Especially when moving the area light around, I highly recommend turning it up to make it easier on your computer. The light intensity should adjust itself internally to keep the amount of light being made consistent when you change the quality.
Because of the nature of this blueprint, it’s a terrible idea to even consider using this dynamically. This is intended for use only with static lighting.
And of course, it works properly with the reflection captures:
The download is attached, I hope someone’s able to find it useful!
Note: Because I’m using it in a project I’m working on in 4.19 it may not open in older versions. I tried to get it to support the various lighting units and let it change them, but I couldn’t get that part working yet.