UE4 offers a massive amount of the most cutting edge graphics features developers could hope for. The good news is, for many games on many platforms, with a good set of level designers, this will be handled largely automatically. However, being ignorant of how the systems work in general can have two major drawbacks for a team: not taking advantage of the built-in advanced engine techniques, or you may encounter build time or build size problems and not know where to begin addressing them. While the actual techniques and physics of the lighting available in Unreal could fill books by itself (and does!), our theme of being informed on options and use will be our focus again in this chapter. By the end, confidence in how to best use lighting and how to troubleshoot any problems that arise from it will be assured, to help make a modern beautiful game and guide a team to best practices. This chapter covers:
- Volumetric lightmaps
- Atmosphereic and folumetric fog
- Lightmass (settings and previewing tools)
- Profiling lightmaps