Here is some things I think could help with dynamic lighting only workflow:
- Make Enviromental reflections work without static lighting and cast Image Based Lighting to surroundings. It would help immensly, because it would help breach the gap between fully dynamic lighting and some statically casted IBL where is it needed. It helps creating dynamic day-night cycle, as those localized probes doesn’t break lighting as fully builded scene with GI and static ambient light.
- Add more Shadow Mapping options. Shadow Maps are inhernetly flawed, it would nice if we can select shadow mapping technique or even better have access to more settings directly in editor on light, to tweak shadow map settings to particular scene. Things like bias, resolution, penumbra variance (I’m not expert, but I think there is quite a bit of options tha cloud be exposed).
I wholeheartedly agree that the current Shadow Maps are flawed. I believe the Self Shadowing Accuracy parameter might be the bias. However more parameters have to be exposed for sure. Especially the shadow resolution is way too important to be obscured in code. Having access to another shadow mapping technique would be awesome too, even if it comes at a higher performance cost. I still wonder if I am just missing some available settings as I wrote here: https://rocket.unrealengine.com/questions/1694/how-to-avoid-shadow-acne-with-fully-dynamic-lighti.html
on 2: We are working on shadow quality issues and might expose some settings - there are some options but the settings are extremely content specific (low/high quality settings, light dependent, occluder dependent, receiver dependent, distance dependent, wall thickness, soft/hard, pointlights/directional lights, projector angle, shadowmap resolution, subsurface scattering, translucency) and hard to understand. This is why we generally expose less settings.
We will continue to improve on teh current system.
on 1: Reflection Environment not being affected by static lighting would be a great option to have. I added TTP 300020 for this. It could be done automatically when the level has bForceNoPrecomputedLighting checked, but I’d rather it be a separate option, because it can be nice to still bake in sky lighting to lightmaps while doing everything else with dynamic lighting.