Wow, so this post blew up!
Great ideas guys, and I think that we are generally frustrated with this huge limitation in the engine. But then again, we must remember that UE4 is primarily a game development platform, and not really specifically built with archviz in mind (to get passable results we have to literally edit the program in baselightmass.ini!) That being said it really has huge potential in the future, and adding such a feature would really help the engine on its way to becoming much more useable for multiple purposes. (Think about this UE4 devs… money to be made)
That being said, in the present state of things, we as developers, artists, architects, and designers must find ways to get around the physical limitations of the Unreal system, but also those though clients and ourselves to a certain extent. A client is never going to understand the way that lightmapping works, or how they cannot come back after the fact and ask to have a wall or chair moved a foot back. Some sort of clarity must be brought to the situation, and this is really only possible with us teaching and explaining it to them. For some in the industry this is obviously too far from the perfectly distilled, pure, archviz that they wanted to do, but for others it is plausible. Once clients gain an appreciation for what we do and begin to fully grasp what exactly their late feedback on a project really means, good things will come. If people really understood what game design and visualization was really like (and it was much more mainstream) developers wouldn’t have problems. Although it may sound a little out there, some sort of 5-6 min introductory video to these topics should be created and circulated, to push on this knowledge. Very popular UE4 videos only get ##,### views, while pewdiepie gets ##,###,### on what is created with this program, and people need to see this.
I realize that was all WAY off topic, but I just had to say it. The architectural visualization industry, as with so many others, is so under appreciated.
More on topic, what sort of system do you guys invision for the light baking process in UE? Is it some sort of way of selecting only a part of the scene, or is it just a way of re baking the new objects over the old? I personally would like to be able to drag out some sort of a box (like a lightmass importance volume) over an area and only have the new lighting built in that area.
Lots of good ideas floating around that I hope the Unreal devs have looked at…