I just had a discussion with my teacher, regarding light maps. He saw my project, and mentioned I should remove the lights once I’ve baked them in. It makes sense to me, but is that really the concept of light mapping? Don’t light sources disappear from reflective surfaces?
With the main question i´m not sure about the answer, but you can use emissive materials to get the reflections of light sources.
Reflection actors are baked too. The concept of light mapping is save any realtime calculation.
IMO, Remove light have not beneficials and you lost the possibilities of make more fine-tune
Don’t remove them in any case.
Lights only matter for performance if they’re “Stationary” or “Movable”, If you use “Static” lights they’ll be ignored for the most part after building the maps.
I have them mostly set on Stationary since the quality is better. I’ve figured out a good way to deal with it - Bake the lights, and then make them not create any shadows. That’s what baking is after all - saving shadow data on the texture itself, so I can leave it turned off without it affecting reflective and specular surfaces.
You can set stationary lights to cast shadow either none, dynamic, static or both. There isn’t ever need to remove lights after building and that totally wrong way to do things. So after building lights you should’t touch any lights configuration or you may have to build lights again.
Use stationary lights if they need to affect dynamic objects by casting shadows or making specular highlights, use static lights if there aren’t any dynamic objects that need to be affected, either way don’t remove the lights after building lighting, it doesn’t improve performance and the engine will pop up a message about the lighting needing to rebuilt because the lights are gone.