Disabling static lighting on terrain

We have a very large world that has a mix of interiors and exteriors of buildings and we would like to have static/stationary lighting for the interiors, and dynamic lighting for the exterior. I ran into a problem when building light though, that even with lightmass importance volume, the lighting gets baked into the landscape as well, and from what you can imagine isnt what we would like. So is there anyway to disable static lighting on the terrain to prevent massive compile times and larger ram usage for lightmaps?

Hi Shirk,

While it is possible to stop an object from casting a static shadow, you cannot stop an object from receiving a static shadow unless it is movable since there will be no need for baked lighting. All Static objects use a lightmap that handles the static shadows that are baked in.

There are a couple of ways to try to get around this though:

  • For your Landscape, you can adjust the Static Lighting LOD to 1 or 2 to prevent the landscape bake from crashing lightmass or running out of ram.
  • You can disable “Cast Static Shadows” for any meshes that are not needed to be baked.

Thanks for the reply, but neither of these options really solve my problem.

Same problem Here.

Hi Shirk, we have the same problem on our open world too, and the solution I used is a level based static lighting world.
I keep the landscape in tiles with world composition, and I create a level for every static lighting based environment, then I build them without having the landscape loaded. To do this you’ll need to keep landscape out of this levels, so for example you won’t use it for floors or walls.