Baked lighting
We have already defined light baking as a process that inserts lights and shadows into a specific texture. Now, let’s see how we can achieve this in Unreal Engine 5. There are two ways to process indirect light calculations: through CPU Lightmass and with GPULM. But before we begin, we need to prepare the scene for baking lights. Lumen is not compatible and therefore needs to be turned off. We can do that by going to Project Settings and choosing None for Global Illumination. To proceed with light baking, we need to pay attention to reflections in the scene and UV coordinates for various meshes, and then learn how to perform the light baking itself. Let’s explore these steps together.
Reflections
Baked lights are more efficient than dynamic lights because they don’t change during gameplay, but they have a drawback: they don’t create any reflection data for the scene. So, if we want to have reflections with baked lighting, we need to...
