Using pre-made shadowmaps instead of lightmass?

Development Rendering
1

Hi UE4 Community!

I was wondering if anyone knew how shadowmaps and baking occurred with lightmass?
I was also wondering if there’s a formula as to how the shadowmaps are made, read and implemented so I might be able to mimic some basic shadows using an external image editor and then import them.

Sometimes building lighting takes too long and dynamic lighting just doesn’t really work with what I’m trying to do.

I know using lightmass is already ‘faking’ shadows (it seems to me that shadows are just an overlaid texture), but I was wondering if we can make the fake shadows ourselves?

Think about a candle in minecraft, no matter where abouts on a big flat map you place that bad boy, it’s shadows will appear exactly the same at every location (as if they’re pre-defined). Is UE4 capable of doing this?

Some food for thought - thanks guys!

2

maybe light functions could help you with that.

3

Technically you could, the engine doesn’t have anything setup to make that easy though, and if it did it would be a huge pain to do because you would have to set things for each individual object (unless you built the tools to do it automatically). It would get even more complicated when you use multiple copies of an object because each one would have to have a lightmap rendered. The beauty of Lightmass is that it handles everything for you.