I spent a few hours trying to figure out why my lightmap/shadowmap bakes weren’t working. Whenever I went into “Show > lighting components” to disable “dynamic shadows” my shadows dissapeared, therefore knowing that my shadows were indeed not baked.
Imagine my surprise when I later discovered that there were baked all along, it’s just that disabling “Show > Dynamic Shadows” ALSO disables baked shadows.
I think to save people time and energy I think either:
a) The Dynamic Shadows flag should only disable actual dynamic shadows, or
b) The flag should be renamed to just “Shadows”
Hey .com,
There is a feature request in place, UE-17758, where it explains Stationary Directional lights wiping static lighting when disabling the dynamic component of the light so that only static lighting will be baked for some objects. This creates a problem though that static lighting is wiped when the CSM is within range. Since the objects that have disabled the dynamic portion of the light the static lighting will not display. This is intended to be this way, but this can be confusing for users because the tool tip and documentation do not indicate this.
This is by design as the issue has been reported already by another user. The UI is somewhat confusing because it makes the two shadow techniques look like independent systems. They don’t work like that, the CSM distance blend is a deferred pass and it cannot consider per-object properties. So it’s best to think of it as a single discrete state, thus to work properly it requires shadow casters have the corresponding setup too.
Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.
Thank you,
I predicted there’s probably a engineering reason behind the way it behaves, but hence my suggestion B. If a system works, but the UI and documentation is misleading then I consider that to be a bug of sorts.