AR Foundation - Baked Lighting - Strategy and Limitation Questions

Unity Engine
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Hi

I have a complete AR interior prefeb of a large hall, ie floor, walls, ceiling etc, that will be placed in the realworld, to replace parts of the realworld. However, I’m unsure on how to approach the lighting, which should look as real as possible but does not need to match the real world lighting. Obviously the default directional light wont work here since that is typically the ‘sun’. I have many light sources that need to emit light.

  1. So I’m thinking of baking the lighting into the textures in blender and just use that. However my concern is here that my space is fairly large and 4K textures wont cut it, as it would appear too blurry when looking up close when you’re in AR. IE my floor and ceiling tile currently, so I have a highres texture for that that repeats a few times. But of course if you bake it, it dumbs down the repeat into a single texture and stick the lighting over that, and 4K is already a bit pushing it for AR!
  2. I could go the adaptive probe volume route directly in Unity, however that saves the lighting per scene and my prefen is technically not in the scene until I place it. I dont think you can store the APV directly in the model prefab that would be placed. However I suspect this may give better results than the baked Blender version if it is possible.

Could somebody point me in the right direction on how to approach this please…

2

There is no such thing as a “right direction” here, it’s just up to your app’s requirements and how you choose to implement the logic.

From an AR perspective, in this forum we don’t have much to add other than letting you know that Environment Probes exist: Environment Probes | AR Foundation | 6.0.2.

If you want to get into the details of texture compression, mipmaps, light baking, etc, these are questions better suited for the graphics forum.