hey guys,
I have a very basic question about baked lighting and moveable actors like doors, windows etc…
Maybe my question is a kind of stupid but when baking light, i’m baking all the shadow and GI informations down to a texture which results in a realistic look. Having doors and windows in my scene, with the possibility to open and close them, brings me to the situation to make them “moveable” actots… But when setting them to moveable they will longer receive any GI information from the scene…
Is there any way to bake a kind of standard shadow and GI information to the door without weird shadows from the rest of the scene which wouldn’t mach no longer when moving the door ?
There is a couple of things that can help with movable actors in statically lit and baked GI areas to help them blend in more convincingly.
Option 1:
You can use the option in the meshes details panel for “Light as if Static” which will require the movable actor to have a lightmap UV setup. This will treat the object as a static mesh when building lighting. When the object moves any shadows that it baked will stay on the floor and not move, and anything baked on to it will remain even if it moves. This option, while convenient can break realism in your scene.
Option 2:
If you have a lightmass importance volume around your playable area you can go to Viewport > Show > Visualize > Volume Lighting Samples. This will bring up a bunch of points around the scene within the Lightmass Importance Volume that will represent the indirect lighting cache. These points help light movable objects in a statically lit environment. By default, the points are spaced at a moderate distance and this can cause any movable object to not look completely right in a static environment. You can increase the number of volume lighting samples in the scene by going to your world settings > Lightmass > Volume Lighting Samples and lowering the value. The default is 1.0. Changing it to .75 or .5 will provide more samples to help light your movable actor. If needed you can go down to 0.1, but this will increase memory usage by doing so and may not be needed. Try adjusting this value to see what kind of results you get.