How to have static and dynamic lighting?

Development Rendering
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1

we are developing a massive online open world game and i would be happy to see any advises in terms of performance . any way lets ask my main question . in the game there is a lot of buildings and a lot of cars and objects and players . i want objects + buildings to have static lighting so they don’t cost performance and cars + players to have dynamic lighting . the thing is when i set buildings static and set the directional light to static and bake the lighting and then change the light to dynamic (because i want players to have dynamic shadow) and then i run the game i don’t see much of change in performance . anyway if what i just said confused you just answer this question . if you were about to develop this game (buildings + objects = static , players + cars = dynamic) what exactly would you do ?

I will really appreciate the time you put on typing

Thanks

2

Hi!

In theory kind of the way you imagine:

  • you’ll have static objects in your scene: you can bake their lighting with your static lights
  • you can have slightly changing (intensity, color) lights (stationary) which will add on to the static results
  • and then you’ll have the fully dynamic lighting for your moving objects

So these 3 will give you the whole lighting! You “can’t” (and not the solution) build lights and then change the light to stationary/movable! Your lighting will be broken and you’ll get error messages from Unreal…

My answer is not accurate but you’ll get the idea…

3

The solution is to change the Directional Light type to Stationary and then build lighting, that means that the objects that are static (buildings) will have built shadows, and the dynamic objects that also cast shadows will cast in realtime

Note that like a Static light you cannot move a Stationary Light, but you can do things like changing intensity and color.

You can also enable the checkbox “Enable Area Lights for Stationary lights” in the directional light so you can benefit from soft shadows

4

Hi everyone! I have tried the solution suggested by ZlotyGames, but my static objects are not giving static shadows.
(Directional Light - Stationary SkyLight - Static)
Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
I created thread, where I opened the question in more detail