Hi so up until now we’ve been working in a fully dynamic lighting environment for easier iteration time but now we’re looking at moving to baked lighting for the sake of performance.
When I do a static lighting bake, everything is shadowed as expected. However when I bake stationary light the only way I get any actual shadows is from the cascade shadow maps. Gi is baked correctly but as far as I can see everything else is permanently lit and shadowed dynamically.
All of my meshes are set to static, and I have a static skylight and a stationary directional sunlight. I’ve just flipped all of my static meshes to stationary out of curiosity to see if that solved my problem but can provide screenshots after this build finishes if required.
Found what was causing it - No matter what is set to contribute to it, far shadow distance needs to be set to zero for static shadow maps to be shown by a stationary lights on static objects. The part in the linked post “The dynamic shadow casting distance will light everything within it’s set distance dynamically. If an actor is set to use only static lighting it will not have any shadow casting until it is outside of the dynamic distance range.” is what put me onto this. Of course because we used to be using full dynamic we had this distance set to non-zero and hence were getting non-default results from the setup.
Hey man, just dropping by to thank you for answering your own question! I was having the same issue, and forgot to dial the far shadow distance back down to 0. Your own answer reminded me I had previously set a distance…
