Same light source, same lightmap resolution on the surface. But on the first screenshot the light is set to static, and on the second - to stationary. Both scenarios were baked.
Why does static light looks so much worse after baking? I can’t set every light source on my scene to stationary, because it will result in overlaps, obviously.
This post pretty much sums it up.
It’s a trade off. Computation speed vs quality.
I mean… yeah, it does sum it up, and not really something new to me. But I guess I’m just a bit surprised at how much like аss static shadows look when I try to keep lightmap resolution in “greens”.
When I was going for “looks on the scene are more important” I was simply increasing lightmap resolutions until it looked good.
But I imagine that this is not a very good approach in terms of optimization. However, I must confess, I don’t really know how much of a hit higher resolution lightmaps will make on performance in 2025, when hardware is much more advanced than back in 2016 when that post was made.
By default, stationary lights store their static shadows in a separate texture as a 2D distance field which allows them to generate sharper shadows at lower lightmap resolutions.
One of the side effects of this is that you can’t get area shadows from them, which is why you can disable the 2D distance field generation by enabling “Area Shadows for Stationary Lights” on the light you want to have area shadows, or there is a project-wide setting in project settings for distance field stationary shadows. If you set (or unset, in the case of the project setting) either of these then the resulting shadow will look like a static light.
Static light shadows are baked directly into the primary lightmap and so they can’t be stored as distance fields.
It will primarily affect build times for you and GPU memory and size on disk for the end user, may also impact streaming performance. If you use SVT lightmaps it probably won’t matter to the end user other than size on disk.
Thank you for the reply. Yeah, I did notice the “Area Shadows for Stationary Lights” behaving similar to static lights when I was testing, although not exact the same.
Does enabling SVT for the project also applies it to lightmaps textures? Or do I have to do something else to toggle it? I don’t see any results on google for “unreal SVT lightmaps”.
Should be in project settings, as I recall it’s called “virtual texture lightmaps” or something. Be aware that SVT has inherent streaming latency that will look like pop-in of the textures as the higher res mips ares streamed in. Unreal’s regular mip streaming is less efficient by being more conservative and so this tends not to be a problem.
This isn’t super noticeable on lightmaps unless you have insufficient padding around your lightmap UV islands.
