Using Static AND Dynamic Lighting in the same game

you can have static and dynamic lights in a scene. if you set a light to moveable it’s fully dynamic. this can be applied to any light. Light Types and Their Mobility in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation

as for using a baked directional light for a cave and not having it illuminate other areas of a level, i’m sure there are ways to do that but i haven’t had a need of it yet. if you have your area broken down into sub levels then you don’t have to worry about it though as lighting (at least static) does not propagate between levels.

Thanks, but I’ve meant something different. What I want is to exclude all static lighting and the need of lightmap baking from the exterior map by having it disabled in the project settings, but to be able to override it in scenes where I need it. I remember there was once the option for “Allow static lighting” in the world settings, but I can’t find it anymore in 4.15.

The thing is IF I enable static lighting in the project settings I need to set all lights in the exterior world scene to moveable to not bake lightmaps…means even campfires need moveable lights then.

those lights are going to have to be moveable; static lights only bake light maps. there’s nothing preventing you from using static/stationary lights for stationary light sources (that’s the intent) and a dynamic light for the sun. you won’t (afaik) be calculating light maps for any objects beyond the radius of a static/stationary light so there shouldn’t be any performance issues there. i did a quick google search and it doesn’t look like there’s anyway to disable light maps on an object but still use that object in lightmap baking, if that’s what you’re trying to do.

Thanks, I’ve also found a boolean “Force No Precomputed Lighting” in the World Settings tab below lightmaps. This should do the job for the exterior world I guess.

i found that as well but from what i read it just disables lightmaps completely. i would be interested in whether that’s true or not though; i didn’t look very hard.

also, if this ends up being resolved then please mark it as such. if you have a more direct answer then this thread then feel free to make a new answer and select that. thanks.

Hi there,

we need to use dynamic lighting on the exterior world since there is a constantly moving sun, but I would prefer baking lighting in interior scenes like in caves or dungeons. So far I didn’t find an option to use both lighting types in the same project…is there any or can we really only use dynamic OR static lighting?

Yes, it disables it completey, but only in the scene. This is exactly what I want since the game is build up like Bethesdas Games where every interior is it’s own map and you will be teleported via the doors