I was wondering how it’s possible to achieve uniform lighting.
If I use point lights the lighting looks really good but you can’t have uniform lighting as there are gaps in between the lights.
If you overlap to cover the entire level it causes slow down.
The light is concentrated in to a single place causing bright patches.
Lastly how do you match static lighting with dynamic lighting? I find static lighting looks significantly worse than dynamic lighting. Everything looks flat.
Maybe a directional light with low intensity would do the trick?
There is quite a lot of different ways to do this, but one way that might work for you is to change the “Shape” of a point light by using the “Source Radius” and “Source Length” inside the point light “Light” properties. This will create a light shape similar to a strip light (Fluorescent tubes) if you enter values like 5 (or something similar) for “source radius” and 200 (or something similar) for “Source Length”.
I imagine there is more performance cost for this (but don’t know for sure), however but might be good for testing.
In the pic I see a few issues as to being able to control the overall lighting levels as to ambient fill requirements and with an area of this nature you would want to start with a base as to as you say a uniform lighting level to be able to see the area with out hot and cold shadowed zones.
Of key interest is lighting elements, such as point lights, are photometric in nature as in they are based on real world lighting models as to falloff values and obtaining a uniform level of lighting is almost impossible to obtain a true renderosity effect on their own. For example you can see your already getting the red X which indicates you have to many lights overlapping.
What is interesting is in most game engines rendering techniques used in apps like Maya or 3ds Max, or even Blender, are transferable so we can steal a few ideas as to lighting and make use of them in Unreal 4.
Sooo
To start lets remove all of the lighting elements and begin by painting the canvas, so to speak, by first establishing our base ambient fill using a postprocess and a Ambient cube (HDR) map.
As you can see you can effect the fill with out increasing direct lighting levels
Another trick is if you have one area that needs more fill than another you can either overlap a postprocess and blend it in or make an ambient fill light by turning off inverse square shadows and cast shadows creating a fill only lighting element.