Hey all! I’m working on illuminating my game and I seem to be running into a few problems. I know that there are the 3 different light mode (static, stationary, and movable), but I’m having problems with them. When I set all of my point lights to “Static,” it is not rendering shadows and it is turning all of my door frames black, like so:
From first glance, it looks like I should be using “Movable” lights (no brainer!), but when I set all of my lights to “Movable,” the game/editor begins to run very choppy and appears to be really bogged down (and I don’t have too shabby of a machine.) Anyways, I just can’t seem to get the lighting to look high quality, AND have it run affordably (not too expensive). If anybody could help me out, I would appreciate it SO much. Thanks!
So the different type of lights are handled in different ways inside of the engine. Static lighting is baked lighting. So, you will run a light build and it calculates where the lights are what they are shining, and their shadows etc. The least expensive lights are static lights because the calculation is done and baked before you ever start a level. In the middle you have stationary which has a bit of the static lighting computations but has a hint of the movable in respect that they are stationary in the level but emitting in real time. Lastly comes the movable lights which can move around in the level, in real time and have to be updated however fast. These are typically used for characters and object that actually move around like movable assets or animations. So it really comes down to what your budget with the project is and what goal you are trying to reach for your game.
Suggestion would be to balance the movable lights on the things, like your character that the player will be interacting with all the time and you want that light to be the best quality you can have, and the stationary/static lights for areas you are either only going to pass through once or you think are of lesser importance.
I will also link you to all of the UE4 open source documentation on Lights.
Thanks ! This REALLY helps. I appreciate it! However, are static lights supposed to cause objects (like my player model and the door frames) to become black? Are they not supposed to provide shadows with sharp lines? Is there any way to bump up the quality of static lights?
Thanks for all of your help and the quick reply! I appreciate it!
So what may be happening is the shadows from two different sources are being baked over each other. Try experimenting with different lights that cast shadows. For instance one light in the room where you are looking through the door emitting a shadow while the light in the other room doesn’t emit a shadow. The only other thing I can think of is in the mesh when you double click it and bring up it’s editor. Under LoDo there is a tab, minimized by default, that says Build Settings. About halfway down under that menu is another input called Min Lightmap. By default it is 64, bump that up to about 256. It works like resolution, so 64x64 is fairly low. Obviously, the higher it is increased the more expensive things become but you should be able to find a happy median.
