Why are static light baked shadows are so pixelated compared to stationary?

[3dRaven]

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So UE4 using lightmapping to bake out light information (indirect lighting, brightness, etc.) into texture maps whenever you hit “Build Lighting”. A lot of game engines use this approach and have been doing so for years because it’s one of the best ways to light realtime games in terms of performance. All of these lighting calculations don’t have to be done in realtime while you play the game. This is part of the offline rendering process, and in fact is a method used to render lighting in all t…

This post pretty much sums it up.

It’s a trade off. Computation speed vs quality.