[quote=“Bananaft”]
Why? Why so many people want to use baked lighting? It’s a lot of work to build and support, it’s hard to work with, has lots of limitations, requires rebaking on every change in the level. And all that for pale, washy, inexpressive and absolutely static result.
While with deferred lighting you can have flickering and blinker lights, moving lights, put a point-light on every projectile, weapon flash, hit effect, you can make every light on the level breakable, you can have enemies with flashlights looking for the player in the dark.[/quote]
Dynamic and static lights aren’t mutually exclusive.
With baked lights you can do expensive stuff like bouncing light, glowing surfaces and more. The result will be much better looking.
From aesthetics point of view real time lights are the limited option.
With light probes you can use the lightmaps to light dynamic objects, which will take into account bounced lights and such.
There are ways to turn on/off baked lights, AFAIK you could have 2 versions of the affected lightmap parts and switch between them or something like that.
Or you could just use dynamic lights in that case.
Also while in development you don’t have to rebake the lightmap every time, or at least not in high quality.