Hello, my question is that if I want to bring in an HDRI cubemap and create a lightsphere that has this cube map, what settings can I select to help reduce light builds so I can more quickly evaluate setting up and evaluate the HDRI environment lighting? I know I can go into project settings to turn off texture streaming but it seems the light builds are still calculating textures. Basically, I want to have the environment have no materials/ textures rendering, have all other lights turned off except for my HDRI so I can more quickly set that up? It is the sme thing I do in Vray with 3dsmax still scene renderings before doing final renderings. Thanks for any suggestions or thoughts that may help.
Very few non-lighting features contribute to light baking times since it’s a separate process. Just disable your other lights in the scene, use reasonable Lightmap resolutions, and reasonable World Settings depending on what type of quality you’re looking for. Also use a lower overall quality setting if it’s just for tests. Medium with medium-high quality settings in World Settings works well for me.
If you’re only looking to view the HDRI affecting a flat gray surface, you can leave the materials and just view the scene in Lighting Only view.
Thanks Rose. I will say I am not super experienced in the nuances of lighting in UE4 but I can see from your sig you seem to have the experience. I am asking the question becasue i was watching the following video: Interior HDRI Lighting in Unreal Engine Step by Step Tutorial. - YouTube. In this video, he is setting up a HDRI for an interior arch viz and there are settings he is turing off to test the lighting. I tried this but my light bake was still ridiculous where i would need to wait hours for the final bake. I turned off the textures as he suggested, had all of my lights turned off, I was on preview light build and there seemed to be no difference. I will tell you that I am an archviz guy and I am using datasmith through UE4 to import my 3ds scene model. I don;t think this results in the most optimized model so I am sure I am taking a performance hit on rendering but I was wondering if there is a way to minimize things to be able to more quickly test lighting setups in the scene. You are mentioning world settings and if there is anything more specific you can suggest, I will be grateful.