I am unable to get Unreal to build lighting on an Apple MacBook Pro M4, with it stopping at 0% before failing, and offering no errors beyond:
LogStaticLightingSystem: Warning: Failed to build lighting!!! Lighting build failed.
DumpUnbuiltLightIteractions
Lights with unbuilt interactions: 0
Primitives with unbuilt interactions: 0
Cmd: MAP CHECK NOTIFYRESULTS
MapCheck: Map check complete: 0 Error(s), 0 Warning(s), took 0.09ms to complete.
I have followed tutorials for building lights, but no success. This was in 5.4.4 and I see the same in the 5.6 preview. I have found a couple of other posts mentioning the same issue, but none with a resolution that works (others mention lightness requiring a firewall exception but mine is off).
Is it the case that baked lighting (like GPU Lightmass) is simply untested or unavailable on Apple Silicon? I can’t find any official mention of this on Epic announcements. Has anyone else successfully built lighting on an M4 Mac?
Checking around the community, baked lighting is supported on Apple Silicon, but it does come with a few quirks and conflicts. The overall recommendation in those threads was to switch to Lumen instead. Since your build is not returning a concrete error, it would be a good approach to test.
To setup lumen in your scene, go to Project Settings > Rendering Global Illumination, then set “Dynamic Global Illumination” and “Reflection” methods to Lumen.
Thanks for responding @brs-sebascova, however Lumen is runtime and not baked lighting so the solution to baked lighting not working cannot be to not use it. Has anyone here successfully used baked lighting on Apple Silicon hardware?
