Best way to light foliage - Dynamic vs Lightmass?

fearian · May 2012

Hi guys. I have a foliage heavy scene, with trees that I want to be moving slightly in wind, and I'm wondering what the smartest way to light it is.

At the moment I'm more or less just using a single DominantDirectional light for the sun and baking everything in lightmass. Most of the shadows fall on a Landscape actor. It took me a while to find a lgihtmap size that doesn't look completely shit, but my lights still take along time to bake with all the foliage in the scene and I would even say that lighting looks better before I build lightmass

So I'm thinking about lighting the whole scene dynamically, but I'm not sure if that's really better, or if I'm just missing something basic here. Does anybody have any experience lighting foliage based scenes?

e: Also, I can't get my head around Light Environments - do I need to grok this to use dynamic lights properly?

Sandro · May 2012

You can have both. Increase Whole scene dynamic shadow radius from DominantDirectional light properties. Anything inside that radius will cast dynamic shadows and feather out to static lightmaps outside that radius.

Xendance · May 2012

Sandro wrote: »

You can have both. Increase Whole scene dynamic shadow radius from DominantDirectional light properties. Anything inside that radius will cast dynamic shadows and feather out to static lightmaps outside that radius.

And you still get the lightmass calculated bounce lighting on the meshes

fearian · May 2012

Thanks guys! Exactly what I needed. With the local area dynamically lit, I could chop down the terrain lightmap resolution from 16 to 4 and get massively reduced baking times!

Best way to light foliage - Dynamic vs Lightmass?

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