What on earth does the dynamic lighting option on lights in forge actually do?I swear I didn't even know it was a thing till a few months ago and I still don't know what it does. This may be a stupid question but anyway, does anyone know?
I am not an authority on all the times you want to use it vs not use it, but here it enables the light to actually move and emit different light, in the game. However, most people don't make their lights move. Instead, it uses some cpu power to continuously cast light, rather than baking that light into the pieces. The flare video is a pretty good example
It also helps if the light is in motion so that the light it casts follows the origin. Otherwise, the light that's baked on to the map will stay where it originally started even if the light is moving away from it. Like it says though, the more dynamic lights you use, the lower the performance of the map will be.
be careful if you are using dynamic lights on a large map - they dim out from a distance because there is no bake effect from them. Use both dynamic and non-dynamic lights in one spot to cure this.
I don't know how it works under the hood, but i just recently observed it helps create clean shadows on un-baked objects...
one correction... dynamic lights do not shift their shadows as they move, compared to map geometry. It shifts the shadow of a player, but not geometry. I discovered this (annoyingly) during one experiment I did recently.