Beast would be the obvious answer, the lightmapping is great with it. But when I use it, the terrain will remain lit. Thing is though, the sun in the scene move in a day/night cycle, so obviously the terrain can’t stay lit. I thought of possibly letting Beast do it’s job as usual, and then using the lightmaps in a particle multiply material on a clone of the terrain, but that would effectively double the terrain vertices, and use that much more resources. Is there a way to get JUST the AO and not have the terrain lit?
Depends, can you afford to use one of the splat textures?
Render out an AO over a colourmap (so it isn’t just black and white), then use import that as a terrain texture with a tiling of 1 (so no tiling/repetition).
Then paint that over the terrain with a low opacity (~30% or something).
It may be worth upping the contrast of the lightmap significantly because it’s effectively only going to be there at (~30%) opacity.
day/night cycle, open terrain and lightmapping just dont sound great together.
You need unity pro and realtime shadows.
That’s part of the issue is that Unity’s lighting just isn’t cutting it. It would be great if it could do AO in real-time, but even ignoring that, Unity’s lighting is just… meh… That’s it, like a really plain light in 3Ds max…
Should prbably say I’m working with Unity 3.x, haven’t gathered to money to upgrade yet.
Unity lights are just as good as anything else currently available in the market.
It just takes artistic skills to make things look nice.
SSAO and some more image effects can give you some mood in your scene, but at the end, what matters is how nice your textures and your meshes are.
Oh see now that helps. I don’t think about these things often, and I don’t know much about image effects other than that they… affect the image… But that SSAO is something I’ll use quite often now, thanks 