Hi Tony,
If you’ve used Level streaming this is a very similar process to that. Not very hard to pick up on.
- Create your level with your geometry for starters. Then open the Levels panel (Window > Levels)
- Make a sub-level named “Day” or whatever type of lighting scenario you want. Do the same for a second level for “Night” or whatever you’d like.
- In the Level’s panel, Right-click on your Day and Night levels and select Lighting Scenario > Change to Lighting Scenario.
- Hide one of the levels for Day/Night.
- In this level add your lights and things needed for day light settings. (In my example, I added a Skylight, Directional Light, and BP_SkySphere).
- Build Lighting for this scenario. With the Night Level visibility turned off (click the visibility eye). You’ll get a warning about building with a hidden level. Click Yes, so it’ll build lighting with the other hidden and then click the Build in button in the next warning. The lighting Build will now commence.
- Once the Light Build finishes. Hide the Day Level and Unhide the Night level. Add your Lights and setup for the night lighting here. Build lighting and do the same things from step 6.
- Once that completes you now have the lighting scenarios for both set up for use.
- Open the Persistent Level Blueprint and use the Load Stream Level and Unload Stream Level nodes to load and unload the Day/Night levels. The lighting data for each is carried with them.
In the end, you should see something similar to this for the lighting changes if you’ve set up a day/night switch.
The benefit here is that with a lighting scenario you can build the static lighting for a level and it’s only loading the lightmap data and not having to switch out the environment meshes or do some form of hacky level tricks to get different lighting scenarios.
Only one lighting scenario should be loaded at a time.
I hope this helps and if you have any follow-up questions something isn’t working exactly for you feel free to ask.
Tim
EDIT: You don’t need to hide the levels when you go to build lighting. If both are shown it will build them separately. The only time you need to hide is when you’re adding lighting to these specific Scenarios. It makes it easier to see what you’ve got with the preview lighting.