Help me with my lightning!

Frisco · August 10, 2015, 3:27pm

I am getting desperate here! I created this awesome atmospheric level and finally noticed that my lightning was a overkill! Every light was a stationary or moveable. The FPS was something like 30-40. I read that i can bake the lights by setting them to static. I have been fighting a day to get them working properly but no matter how i tweak the static lights looks horrible!

This is the original scenery i created.

There was too many overlapping lights. If i want to create lightning to huge area the radius will cover many rooms and it will overlap other lights no matter what. Now i tried to create static lights. First i didn’t get them to work at all but finally i removed all lights and builded level so it was black. Then i started to add lights but for some reason they aren’t looking nowhere near as good as the stationary lights.

Here are the most recent screenshot. In the left side there is stationary light and it looks great. Other two lights are static and as you can see they look horrible.

If i try to tweak the lightning it takes like 20-30 min to build the lightning to my level. I changed Static lightning level scale to 0.1, Lightning smoothes to 0.6 and Indirect lightning quality to 2 that was suggested. No luck. Static lights ain’t working. How should i use the static lights? I need to keep my FPS to 90 because this game is for VR. I cannot just put the dynamic lights everywhere cause the radius needs to be so huge and they just overlaps each other. Really need help in here!

Frisco · August 10, 2015, 5:06pm

One note… I looked the Particle Effects demo from Unreal Engine and the place is full of stationary lights and the FPS is over 100 all time. How come the lightning isn’t overlapping and cause performance lost in there?

anonymous_user_cc69b907 · August 11, 2015, 5:56pm

Hello Frisco,

So, Static lighting refers to baked lighting that is calculated by UE4 light build. Everything is calculated from shadows to light rays, and fall off, etc…

In terms of performance Static Lighting will result in offering the best FPS. Dynamic will offer the most expensive solution because it is constantly updating it’s shadows and calculating for objects that move in the world such as the player.

Often times games will create a light that is an actor that follows the player for dynamic lighting associated with the characters movement.

If you are simply looking for ambient lighting. Then you may try turning off the shadows on all but the one light you want illuminating the whole room.

I will refer you to our lighting troubleshooting guide :

As well as official documentation on understanding how lighting works inside of UE4 :

Thanks,