Static Point light effects character

Development Rendering
1

Hi All

I’m putting a level together, and in some areas its pretty dark, I don’t want to bump up the skylight as the atmosphere is nice so I’m using point lights with a large falloff to fill these spaces with low level fill light, what I’ve noticed is that even when the light is turned to static and built these lights illuminate my character. im confused because it was my understanding that static lights should just build shadow maps and then not effect the level ?

Thanks

Mothy

2

Static lights do contribute to the lighting of moveable assets or skeletal meshes via volumetric light maps. They are not directly lighting the characters.

3

Hi ZacD

Thanks for the Info, does anybody know if its possible to stop lights from interacting with a chosen moveable mesh ?

4

Just an update on this question as I hate it when the found solution isn’t added, I found that if I turn off the inverse square falloff on the light then it makes for a much better fill light and I can then stop the super bright patches of light the character was moving into

5

As i know Light Channels work with every geometry type, static, movable, skeletal. By default every object and every light are set to Channel 1. Every object and light can have several light channels (3 max). So you can set all geometry which should be affected by additional point light to channel 1 and 2, and set channels 1 and 2 for you point light. If you will leave light channels of you character to default (channel 1), you additional point light will never affect you character.

At least it should work for dynamic lighting. But im not sure does it work for volumetric lightmaps.

6

You can also change how the lighting for skeletal meshes work in the details panel if you don’t want to use volumetric light maps.

There might be a way to turn off contribution from individual lights to the volumetric light map as well, haven’t looked into that yet.

7

Can you elaborate a bit on this? The only volumetric-related attribute I can find for my movable skeleton mesh in the details panel is “Volumetric Translucent Shadow” which is not for this.

I am trying to achieve a similar thing where I don’t want my baked static env lighting to affect the animated movable character in the level at all. Light channel does not cut it as when setting a light to static, the light channel options are essentially grayed-out.