Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

Lighting techniques

Lighting a level is one of the most resource intensive processes that happens every frame update. When dynamic lights move, it changes shadows, reflections, and scattered light, which all have to be recalculated and redrawn. To compensate for this, Unreal Engine 4 gives the option to bake lightmaps for each object. This creates static lighting by baking the lighting data into a lightmap on each object. Lightmaps can't be as realistic as dynamic lighting, but the performance difference is very dramatic. That isn't to say that dynamic lighting doesn't have a place in VR projects. Dynamic lights may still be used in limited numbers, and they should never touch one another. If the scene you are creating is an outdoor scene, ...