Questions - lighting and atlas for portfolio

i_like_turtles

Hello!

I started learning UE4 a couple weeks ago, and I'm on a quest to finish some environment portfolio pieces. Right now I'm almost finishing modeling a small Italian town street. I have 2 questions:

1- How useful is to focus in lightmap baking for portfolio? Considering that nowadays a lot of AAA games are using dynamic lighting (or a mix with static), for my first pieces would it be better to keep them dynamic? I imagine it can cut a lot of time to get nice results, also considering that for portfolio you have the luxury to go a bit higher with mesh density / texture size to show more detail. I feel that I would take at least 1 extra week unwrapping lightmaps and solving problems, as I never did that before in UE4 except for some small tests.

2- Is it normal to combine all the decals you need in a single texture atlas and still use them as deferred decals? Maybe with a texture cropping or texture offset function? Is it worth it performance-wise or better using single decals for everything?

3- Is it possible/viable to combine main texture maps in atlases and still keep them tileable? For example, if I have 4x 1k maps (like ground texture, brick wall, wood planks and roof) and want to combine all of them in a 2k map but still make each quarter of the atlas tileable for the respective objects, how should it be approached?

Thanks a lot!
Cheers

Obscura

1. Lighting method in games really depends on the situation and they have fully dynamic lighting only if its needed. Performance really matters and it isn't always that easy to hit 60 fps, An open world game requires dynamic lighting for example because of the day night cycle. Many games don't need dynamic lighting. In games where the level lighting and time of day doesn't change, its still a good idea to bake the lights. But not fully... Using mainly stationary lights gives the best result in this case. Personally I would never use only "static" lights, because their specular sucks very much. Only stationary and dynamic lighting gives you nice view dependant specular reflections. So a scene with only static lights will look kinda flat. Also, its not the light that is expensive but the real time shadow. A complex scene with many dynamic shadow casting lights can be very expensive for regular hardware. More expensive videocards gives somewhat better results, but you still can't really go crazy if you want good framerate. 

But, we are talking about some portfolio piece, and I guess you just want it to look nice, so I would say just go for the dynamic lighting if that makes it easier or prettier. 

i_like_turtles

Obscura said:

1. Lighting method in games really depends on the situation and they have fully dynamic lighting only if its needed. Performance really matters and it isn't always that easy to hit 60 fps, An open world game requires dynamic lighting for example because of the day night cycle. Many games don't need dynamic lighting. In games where the level lighting and time of day doesn't change, its still a good idea to bake the lights. But not fully... Using mainly stationary lights gives the best result in this case. Personally I would never use only "static" lights, because their specular sucks very much. Only stationary and dynamic lighting gives you nice view dependant specular reflections. So a scene with only static lights will look kinda flat. Also, its not the light that is expensive but the real time shadow. A complex scene with many dynamic shadow casting lights can be very expensive for regular hardware. More expensive videocards gives somewhat better results, but you still can't really go crazy if you want good framerate. 

But, we are talking about some portfolio piece, and I guess you just want it to look nice, so I would say just go for the dynamic lighting if that makes it easier or prettier. 

I might end up going for stationary with some point lights to fake GI. If you have any input on the other 2 questions I would love to hear. Thanks a lot for the answer!