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Why can’t I use LightMapProbes without the LightMapGI Node? I don’t want to use the shadow-baking, I just need the global illumination!

This is something I though about for quite a while. I keep wanting to use some kind of global illumination and the LightMapProbes are a perfect fit for that. One can place them whereever useful and their customizability makes them an incredibly useful tool! When there is a red wall, I sure want to put a LightMapProbe there, so that the lighting can reflect that reflection there.

But nope, that’s not how it works! When you want to use LightMapProbe, you MUST use it with the LightMapGI Node, which is mostly used for baking shadowmaps. That works great for small scenes like insides of houses and such, but it does not work with a large terrain for example. This means that we have loads of lighting methods for small scale scenes (VoxelGI, LightMapGI, ReflectionProbe) but for larger areas we are kinda stuck with SDFGI which only works on the Forward+ renderer.

SDFGI is great and all, but unfortunately it is not yet ready for large scale games I feel and its limitation to Desktop platforms really limits its scope.

Imagine how cool it would be if we could do this in a large scale world:

• Use a ReflectionProbe for general treversal (that’s what The Legend of Zelda:Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom does too btw!)

• And use a multitude of LightMapProbes for smaller areas like towns and castles on the overworld to make for better global illumination.

TLDR: I feel that the usage of LightMapProbes and their lighting functionality should be expanded beyond the use in combination with the LightMapGI Node. It could allow for better lighting in large scale worlds.