Hi guys!
Check the following image. On the right, the orange light is as you can see it while being set up in the editor. On the left, similar orange light is after lighting build with “production” quality. Both lights are static. Why is the built light so screwed? Thanks for any advice!
Static works like that on dynamic objects. Use stationary lights instead.
Thanks you helped me, although I don’t understand it much. As you can see on the picture, the light doesn’t even propagate on the character’s background, which is made of static actors. When I changed to stationary, the light started affecting the background, but still not the character, which is a skeletal mesh and thus should be logically dynamic. When I changed to stationary, I also had a few lights “errored” that they are overalapping more than 4 other lights. Finally, I tried moving/dynamic light, which affects the background, the character and looks they way I want it, but I guess it comes with performance costs.
In my case, it seems I can get good on with dynamic lights. It still seems like a bad practice to me through, am I doing anything wrong?
Check your lightmass volume.
What exactly should I see there?
Lightmass volume should contain all relevant part of scene. You can also try to visualize volume samples(dynamic objects use these for indirect light). Also try visualize lights only and remove directional part.
By default the light uses and Inverse Square Falloff so what you get before is the full lighting volume based on volume and the Inverse solution being applied post build. You want it all as in PIE select the light and uncheck Use Inverse Square Falloff
Static lights are fully baked into lightmaps, whereas stationary lights only bake the indirect lighting into lightmaps. With stationary lights the direct lighting component is rendered in a dynamic fashion, which means you’ll get more accurate brightness and specular reflections on the surfaces.
The overlapping error is not because of the lights themselves, but the shadows that cast them. In practise it means that out of the overlapping lights, the one with the smallest radius will start using dynamic shadows instead of shadowmaps.
