Lightning

Everything you need to know about lightning and this plugin.

Dynamic lightning

No special setup is required to use dynamic lightning as this is the default UE behavior.

Build static lightning

Any static actor prefab scene component with a volume will be baked (default UE behavior).

For example, this prefab actor preview (white shapes) has the scene root and all its static mesh components set to Static, meaning it gets fully considered when baking static lightning:

Here in green you can see the baked shadow on the floor from the static point light.

Here we set both white rectangle shapes to Movable, meaning they arent considered and baked for static lights.

Baking also works inside prefab actor with any amount of nesting.

In green the preview root prefab actor with baked pink lightning. In yellow 2 nested prefab actor previews where each has one blue spot light.

As we can see after baking and moving the actor holding the nested prefabs the light is still correctly baked on the objects (world static meshs and nested prefab meshs)

Mixing Static and Dynamic light for same prefab actor class

You can have your prefab actor static (or static + movable) but make it completly dynamic from the Prefab Reference Component.

This is very useful if the prefab actor class is used in standalone (manually placed in the level) and used by one or more PRCs. It allows you to bake however you want the standalone and PRC instances while making specific PRC instances dynamic and not considered for baking. This is typically needed if you spawn your prefab dynamicly and want to avoid having a baked ghost shadow in your level.

To prevent a PRC prefab actor preview to be baked, disable Can Bake Static Lightning For Preview Prefab Actor.

Here the same prefab actor class is used two times. At the top left you have a standalone instance completly static, which got baked on the wall by the static point light. And the bottom right instance is a preview from a PRC with Can Bake Static Lightning For Preview Prefab Actor set to false, which is completly dynamic, meaning no baked lightning.