DevBlog #2 The Missing Few - Turning off Baked Lighting news

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Dev Diary #2 The Missing Few, How to turn off baked Static lights in buildings Unreal Engine 4. We look at how we got it working.

Posted by Erndog2k on Apr 15th, 2018

DevBlog #2 The Missing Few - Turning off Baked Lighting

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to Devblog #2 for The Missing Few. This week we are talking about Turning off Lights in Unreal Engine 4 even when Static Lights are Baked in the scene.

Static Lights Off

So, I wanted to be able to turn the lights on and off. Dynamic lights do this job perfectly, but performance cost is insane when I have a lot of lights.

After a lot of searching and testing solutions, I found that If you want to keep the baked lighting but cut it off completely when the light is off. Simply Set up a Post Process Volume around your room and lower the Global Illumination: "Indirect Lighting Intensity" down to 0 through Blueprints when the light is disabled.

BP Examples

Every light asset has an event that will set the Emissive value of the materials to 0. If this isn't done then the lights in the scene will still have the Emissive glow.

Here is an example of the Blueprint that turns off the lights in a room/area. Here we scan the scene for all actors of a certain Class and then for each run there events. Then proceed to set "Indirect Lighting Intensity" down to 0.

Post Process Volumes

In order for this to work correctly or as good as it can. We need to set the Post Process Volume inside the Building to "Unbound" and give it higher priority then the Base Post Process Volume.