Indoor lightning for games. Lightmaps or realtime ?
polycounter lvl 10
Hi,
I'am gathering information for a upcoming project. it's a indoor horror scenario for a first person game. 4 players, all of them with flashlights.
How you guys would light this scene ? Static or dynamic ?
Reading about the two approaches, seems Static has the best quality, but it can be a pain in the ass to deal with light map errors.
Full dynamic is not THAT expensive anymore, but i don't know how much Light Propagation Volumes works (also is there any other way to have globalGI without lightmaps and Light Propagation Volumes ?).
Have anyone lit a scene like this ? How was your approach ? did it work well ?
I'am gathering information for a upcoming project. it's a indoor horror scenario for a first person game. 4 players, all of them with flashlights.
How you guys would light this scene ? Static or dynamic ?
Reading about the two approaches, seems Static has the best quality, but it can be a pain in the ass to deal with light map errors.
Full dynamic is not THAT expensive anymore, but i don't know how much Light Propagation Volumes works (also is there any other way to have globalGI without lightmaps and Light Propagation Volumes ?).
Have anyone lit a scene like this ? How was your approach ? did it work well ?
Replies
Basic light condition is very dark, but possible to get around without a flashlight.
There will be many lights that will be interactive, not movable, but intensity will be dynamic.
Some rooms may have more lights than other, but generally speaking, it will be dark.
The reason I want GI, its because I plan to have many colored wall papers, and I would like to have that nice, soft, color bleeding.
Also, most of the level will be static meshes, so I want to take advantage of that.
Another thing, there will be many doors that will be interactive, so I can't have light from a room illuminating another room, or else, when the player interact with the door, the lightning will be wrong since is not dynamic.
When baking the light map, the orange tint of the walls will bleed into my corridor making it lit orange near the doorway.
So if i close the door between the room and the corridor, the orange tint will still be in the corridor right ? am I getting this wrong ?
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/255804/dynamic-door-baking-lightmap.html?sort=oldest
Where they say that there is a checkbox called "light as if static". I think probably thats what you need.
I'll setup a simple scene and test this. i'm curious now.
I did a search on the setting he metions. "light as if static". And since UE 4.19 is now encapsulated in Lightmap Type -> "Force Surface".
If you are curios too. this is it. https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/VolumetricLightmaps/index.html
After further research, dynamic doors and static lightning will never look good.
I did some testing and if the door is movable, the pre-computed GI will lit my door on booth sides even if only one side is being lit, and the indirect lighting wont change if the door is closed or not (obviously).
I made this test scene, the room on the left is all orange, and contains a spotlight casting light directly to a wall. the indirect light is shading the corridor orange as expected. The door is set as movable, and as you can see, the shading is wrong.
Closed door.
The UE4 forum user 'rabellogp' said :
"There is no easy way to overcome this limitation with static GI. Even if you manage to get the door itself looking right with volumetric lightmaps, you won't get proper light on the walls and floors. If you set the door to not cast static shadows, light will "bleed" from the lighter room to the darker room and it will look wrong when your dynamic door is closed. If you set it to cast static shadows and calculate lightmaps with it closed, lighting will look wrong when the dynamic door is open for obvious reasons.
The only way to overcome this is to tweak the static lighting in your environment, placing artificial and natural lights carefully so the difference between lighting in both rooms is minimal when the door is opened. Then you can add some dynamic lights on top of that and play with lights and shadows to add some depth to your scene. "
when used together with pre computed GI, it looks good, If used with no light maps, results are very dim.
also, on my gtx 1070 with SSGI.quality set to 3, its costly.
Why did you mentioned LPV is a no go ? Did you try it ?its heavy ? buggy ?
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes/index.html