I remember a feature in UE3 that I used extensively, and it was the ability to select a few static meshes and build lighting only for selected objects only. This was a massive time saver because I don’t have an extremely fast PC. The ability to build lighting on selected objects allowed me to preview lighting on meshes, or quickly fix meshes with erroneous lighting without having to rebuild lighting across the entire map.
Enter UE4: The lighting requires much more time to build. This feature would be invaluable to me, at least for quickly previewing meshes with broken or messed up lighting. I’m reaching a point in my project where building lighting is taking 30-40 minutes, even on preview, and increased lightmass scale. I’m unable to work with lighting unbuilt because of huge lighting errors.
I request the ability to build lighting for selected meshes/objects, so that I can get things done a little faster.
Also, this feature existed in UE3, so it only makes sense that it carries over to UE4.
Example of broken lighting, and why the ability to build lighitng for certain objects only would be useful:
im starting to hate ue4 because of this issue. how shall i evaluate the lightmap resolution of one mesh if i have to rebuild the whole level every time
I hear your frustration, guys. I’ve been begging for this since 4.0 I mean someone up there must understand how much production time is potentially wasted by rebuilding the whole level to see is your newly added light would bleed through the single wall.
Precisely, wait for the build, then try again next night Well, one workaround I can suggest for you is - create a temp layer, move all you don’t need to test there and turn them into Movable actors. Test what you need, then move them back. I know, it’s stupid and tedious, but may help a bit. Sad thing is, it’s not even a new feature, it’s probably just a matter of adding a few lines of code. Well, hopefully they will hear us.
This is backlogged at the moment. This feature is something that would take a bit of work to implement and is not likely to be worked on in the near future. I don’t want you to get your hopes up that this would be implemented in the next couple of builds.
For the most up to date tasks for the engine I’d recommend following our Engine status on the UE4 Roadmap Trello Board.
Is there a way to see a list of the objects that aren’t baked or batch bake selected levels separately?
I have a lot of small sub-levels, it would be great If I could for example; select 9 of them and batch bake each one of them separately instead of baking all 75 levels everytime.
There is no way to batch or selectively bake object.
To see all unbuilt items make sure you have the output log window opened and then type in the console command DumpUnbuiltLightInteractions. This will show any object that currently does not have lighting built for it.
do you expect that its easier for you to enable external lightmap assignment to objects, then having selective baking? id love to be able to bake with vray and bring in the lighmaps via attribute on geometry (or something alike)
I mean someone up there must understand how much production time is potentially wasted by rebuilding the whole level to see is your newly added light would bleed through the single wall.