Is this something other people have noticed or is it just me? I was hoping there would be a fix in the 4 hotfixes but it doesn’t seem to have come, so now I am wondering if volumetric lightmaps are just not going to be supported in future as Unreal moves more into realtime lighting with Lumen or if the lighting tweaks for megalights has broken this.
after a light bake, everything that is movable has no lighting whatsoever unless it is directly hit by a movable/stationary light and when I go to Show/Visualize/Volumetric Lightmap, no orbs appear. I have tested these on 5.4 and they all work perfectly fine. I’ve tested on blank projects as well as my current ones and I have replicated it every time.
It does work if I change the lightmass setting to Sparse Volume Lighting Samples but the documentation page warns against it so hard that I don’t want to resort to using it if I don’t have to.
you’re not the first one to ask that. i dunno what settings are required. i run everything on, and it works for me. currently only tested in a non wp level, tho. wp should also be supported tho, according to developer information.
“proof”: this is all stationary (mega)lights disabled. lumen gi disabled via ppv. it’s all just stationary gi and volumetric lighting. and a hint of skylight which is also baked into it. engine version is 5.5.4.
Hmm very strange, yeah creating a lighting scenario works so I am glad there is a temp fix so I am happy about that. Though I hope this gets fixed properly by 5.6 at least haha
There is a chance that if others are not experiencing this, it might be related to converting a project from 5.4 to 5.5
that is possible. i moved this project along since 5.1, iirc. can’t think off what setting would trigger it to function properly tho. that’s the thing.
Hmm I have made a fully blank project and the volumetric lightmaps do generate properly so there is something in convertion that gets messed up. Now I am worried that there is something in my project that is irreversably screwed up when it comes to volumetric lightmaps thanks to the upgrade
Okay thankfully this is not the case, after successfully getting volumetric lightmaps to generate properly with the lighting scenario, I deleted the lighting scenario level, rebaked and the volumetric lightmaps are still there so clearly it just needs to be done once to kickstart the generation again
EDIT: No wait I was wrong, it still only works with a lighting scenario
Okay I have returned once again (sorry) to say that actually the lighting scenario solution actually doesn’t work at all. It just LOOKS like it worked. If you go visualise volumetric lightmaps, then it shows the capture spheres and moveable things do show as being effected by them but as soon as I hit play, my main character is completely black and so is anything else movable
I also ran into this issue and was losing my mind trying to figure out what was going on, until I realized it’s specific to UE 5.5.
Here’s what I tested:
I created a new default VR template project.
I enabled Volumetric Lightmap visualization via Show > Visualize > Volumetric Lightmap.
I changed the Directional Light from Stationary to Static.
Then I clicked Build All Levels.
After that, as shown in the first screenshot below, all the volumetric spheres disappeared, and dynamic objects like the guns are clearly not receiving baked indirect lighting anymore:
