Hi all, I’m making a project which involves outdoor playable areas with some destructible environments. I remember back in the UDK days, destructible objects tend to cast pitch black shadows and received no global illumination. I was wondering if there is still any official support for dynamic lighting for ue4. I know theres the light propagation volumes that you could enable but its still in beta. However, I’ve noticed other Ue4 games such as Fortnite, Gears of War 4 and 5 that make use of dynamic lighting, especially Gears 5 with the gibbing system and destructible and movable objects that recieve light bouncing (No dark shadows and receive global illumination on shaded areas). Are they using these light propagation volumes? or simply turning everything on movable without changing the .ini files? I’ve played around with the dynamic lighting feature mentioned in the documentation and it seems pretty weak especially when you try to make shaded environements with a bunch of vegetation, the eye adaption goes crazy and even with adjustments, materials and meshes seem to not light properly for example some meshes shadows not being dark enough which makes areas surrounded by trees seem fully lit. It seems that these devs have their own version of the engine that has dynamic lighting professionally integrated. What are my options if I want to have dynamic realistic lighting with destruction and movable objects without third party software that cost an arm and leg? Do I need to sucumb to baked lighting which takes too long irrespective of your system?
There’s 3 types of lights, Static which is completely baked, Stationary which has dynamic direct lighting and baked indirect lighting, and then Movable which are completely dynamic lights. Most of the time you want to use Stationary lights which will affect both static objects and movable objects, the only downside is that the light can’t be moved around and the indirect lighting is baked. To avoid completely black shadows on dynamic objects it can use a feature called Volumetric Lightmaps, where a grid of light probes are rendered when the lighting is baked, and then the lighting from the probes are interpolated across the dynamic objects to add some realistic indirect lighting to them.
Previously, in both UE4 and UDK both had an alternative that wasn’t didn’t give as good of results for adding some indirect lighting for dynamic objects, but that feature has been there for a while.
Hey thanks so much for replying! Oh that makes so much more sense now, espeically with my observations on Fortnite when the map would go into some sort of night time mode but remain completely lit with post processing volume changing exposure. I assume this is how the gears franchise made their maps and campaign missions, using stationary lights and simulating weather effects with post processing and particle effects. So far my project wont be needing any directional sun light to be moving mid game so I guess ill go for the stationary light type. The volumetric lightmaps feature that you mentioned for dynamic objects, is that also a feature for destructible objects made through chaos so individual fragments have indirect lighting upon destruction?