Will Lightmaps be needed? (Future of Lighting)

Hi…

We plan to release our game somewhere around the middle of 2015.

So I got a few question regarding the state of lighting in the engine by that time.

According to this, Dynamic GI is in UE4 but is still in Beta. So i guess it should be in a good state by the time our game releases.

But my question is will Lightmaps for static objects be needed for Dynamic GI? Generally 3d artists working with me consider making lightmap for static mesh annoying.

Hey envenger -

Lightmaps are an important way to offer complex lighting systems while not over tasking GPUs and processors. While newer video cards and CPUs are able to handle significant increases in rendering and draw calls, there is still limits and lightmaps allow you to mitigate these limits.

For the foreseeable future, Lightmaps will still play an important role in lighting scenes and optimizing levels.

-Eric Ketchum