Generalising Lightmaps HELP!

gc3d

Hey guys looking for some help here!
I have been tasked with coming up with a solution to baking lights into models inside ue4.
Looking to create a general scene that the artists can run their building models through individually to bake the lighting info as AO in the model before moving the models into the live project scene.
We used to have a setup and script in 3dsmax that could do this efficently and would generate a baked map and we are looking for a similar setup inside ue4.
Can anyone give me advice on how to go about this?
Could someone also tell me how the lightmaps work?
Once you build is the information stored in the model's uasset?
Is there anyway to view the Lightmap as an image once its been built?
As you can tell I'm a bit of a novice on this but But I would love to get a deeper understanding of if ue4 can work with this setup. Below is an image of the previous setup we had in 3dsmax I'm trying to recreate.

Hope this all makes sense as its pretty hard to explain! Thanks in advance

cupsster

Lightmaps are stored in scene and baked lightmap data can be viewed but do not expect to import it, UE channel packs lightmaps so without some editor code you won't be able to even identify where in lightmap and on which channel your object is.. Lighting setup can be replicated.. If you have dense mesh and lights won't move you can bake lighting info to vertex colors.

musashidan

What is the project? If it is just an Archvis scene that won't tax the engine too much you can avoid lightmaps altogether by setting your lights to dynamic(moveable)