I have a weird bug. If I start in the main menu my lighting looks OK. But if I’m in my sandbox scene and I use the pause menu to go back to the main menu scene my lighting is messed up. It’s been happening fairly consistently.
I then went to write up this post and now it’s not happening anymore. The only thing I did was go into my lighting tab and looked at the settings in detail to try to root cause it. I then went to repro the issue one more time and now it doesn’t seem to trigger anymore. Source control confirms nothing got changed.
It’s happening again a few hours later. Version control is not picking up any changes that could be causing this. My guess is that maybe it’s because I had no baked lightmaps in my Main Menu Scene. Doing that now and maybe that will help prevent reoccurence.
Almost 24 hours after I baked lighting on the main menu scene I am not seeing the issue anymore. That seemed to have done the trick. Marking that as solution.
On a side note: when the player is built, any unbaked lighting should get baked during the building process. This means that while it looks horrible in the PIE, it should look correct in the built game.