Hi.
Could someone please explain me the way to bake a shadow on a Bumped Diffuse Material?
After baking with beast you see the shadows but the normalmap is no longer visible. When turning off “use Lightmaps” there you see the bump again. I also tried the Legacy Shaders - Lightmapped - Bumped Diffuse. But I just can´t get it work.
My Scene has a Directional Light and a Cube.
normalmaps apply to the close (realtime shadow) range when in dual lightmapping.
they won’t show up on the regular one or in far range, unless you implement a shader for it
This won’t work unless Radiosity Normal Mapping is implemented which will provide normal maps even in shadows and on lightmap baked surfaces. However the Unity Team must have picked up this idea very fast since it’s already under review: new votes won’t hurt though^^
that will likely never happen as it is useless if you have light clouds as beast has them once they are implemented, and the clouds serve more use than just normalmapping …
question though is in which way this affects normal maps. yeah the lightmap won’t bake normal map related data but neither did it in Unity 2.x so no change
I don’t know what lightclouds are, dreamora, but obviously this feature, which was used in HL2 Episode2 and provided nice looking surfaces in e.g. given the caves with specular and bumps and which was described in their paper as useful because it delivers huge performance and good looking objects. Obviously Unity Team neither thinks it’s “useless” because they have it “under review” although it has 16 votes only.
If there is an even better solution I welcome that of course, and I have already read that Beast principally supports a feature like that (just not integrated with Unity yet), but I got no idea what you mean with “lightclouds”. Maybe you can explain a little bit more for the beginners 
In the end, all what I’d like to achieve with this user vote is, that this feature (whatever name it has) will be integrated into Unity.
that´s not what i wanted to hear 
I have a very simple scene: I created a terrain in unity. I made a rough hill in my 3D App. Now i need a normalmap (for what they are made for) to have a more detailed structure on that hill. I load it into unity and everything looks fine. At the end i place a tree in front of the hill.
If i understand right, it is not possible to have a baked shadow of the tree on my hill??
If i use realtime shadows it looks very different to the surrounded beast baked terrain.
With deferred rendering and dual lightmaps the foreground dynamic shadows should blend seamlessly into the background with baked shadows if set up properly. Can you show a screenshot of the problem you are seeing?
of course
Even if the result ist not really professionial, and it is more about the priciple, i want a combination of pic 1 and 2:
The normal map like on 2 and the tree shadow like on 1.
So pic 3 is more or less what i was expecting, after baking. Just without the point light. There is a directional (sun) light in the scene. As shown on pic 3 point lights and spot lights affect the hill after baking, but my directional light doesn´t.
How can i solve this?
Lightclouds are basically points in space that sample all the static lighting data passing through this point / at this point to apply it to dynamic objects passing through that area. that data potentially also can be used to apply it to normal maps and alike as if they were “dynamic lights”, that cost significantly less VRAM than wasting 3x HDRI lightmap space which is more than just a minimal “megabomb”. people requesting radiosity LMs seem to forget that unity does not use 32bit textures for the lightmaps actually, which rather easily will bomb your VRAM requirements to 256MB+
Hey Fabse, I too posted this question, but the thread was ignored… Imagine that!!!
I too had to use a point light to get the normal map/specular to standout with a custom shader to control the specular more discreetly to have it look halfway decent.
Best I could get it:
@Fabse - from that distance I’m going to assume that you just need to increase the shadow distance so that realtime lighting will appear in the foreground a little farther away from your current settings. Then you will have bump/spec happening “close up” that then fades into lightmapped.
And as far as the whole Radiosity Normal Maps with “lightclouds” etc I know that we will include one if not some mix of both of them in a future update of Unity 3.x. Beast supports both so it’s just a matter of figuring out the best path for integrating them in Unity.
Q3map2 (Map compiler for Quake 3) is used in many of the open source Quake 3 engine “upgrades”.
They have radiosity normal mapping which they dub “Deluxe Mapping” You can see an image here:
As cool as rnm’s would be…
Is there no way to just implement normal map bumps in the bake?
I mean, I don’t want to invoke the bump effect with a real normal map and realtime light.
I’d just like to bake the the bumps in the lightmap… Just a plain map with the details of the
bump considered…
cheers
Hi Morcus,
I’ve been experimenting with what you said - but you need a 3D app for that. I use Cinema 4D and…I let you imagine the rest. To be honest I like to think about it as a little secret of mine. The results are beu-beautiful. It’s so simple even thought it’s a fake - but isn’t 3D itself fake? People want the REAL thing…well from what I see even the most real 3D is unreal. PM me if you don’t understand. This has got to be the most conspirative sounding message on this board =)
@Morcus: The problem is inherently low lightmap resolution as compared to your diffuse/normalmap resolutions. A regular brick wall would have every brick of size, say, 128 texels. Then you tile the texture and it covers half of the buildings in your scene. Lightmaps however have to be unique for every piece of surface in your scene (since in general lighting will always differ), so a brick will only be covered by one or two lightmap texels. In two texels you can’t represent any bump details really. That’s why none of the game lightmapping solutions I know go that way and Beast doesn’t even take normalmaps as input.
HL2-style(aka RNM)/UE3-style lightmaps try to encode the main light direction at every lightmap texel (which is almost always very inaccurate, because you have light coming from many directions, especially bounced light - but of course for realtime rendering needs it has to be enough 
and then actually render bump spec surfaces by sampling the normalmap and evaluating the specular lighting equation, which is cheaper than realtime lights, but not super cheap.
Btw, Beast supports baking HL2/UE3 style lightmaps and light probes as well, but baking is only small part of the problem. Much more complex is integrating the rendering of that data deep in our rendering pipeline and making good tools for you guys to use that. So it’s not just about flipping a switch in Beast We’ll add those features sooner or later, if everyone will be convinced these are an important alternative/supplement to the current lightmapping system.
Glad to hear it, because these are very important to have in beast. We need normal maps that react with shadow maps… this whole cutout distance is rather annoying.
I’m looking for something exactly like what Morcus is saying.
I like lightmapping in Beast without having to leave Unity. It’s very convenient, and I like the style of the lighting, too.
However, the problem I’m having is that raytracing during baking doesn’t take the normal map into account, which means I have nasty normal artifacts present in my low-poly meshes, which a normal map otherwise fixes:
Beast needs to take the normal map into account when doing it’s raytracing, and it seems ridiculous that it’s not currently doing this. These results are not acceptable (I hope that is obvious above), which means I need to do all my scene management in something like modo and bake there manually, which makes Unity’s scene management Beast features totally useless. That makes me very sad.
Is there anything I can do that doesn’t involve pretending Unity doesn’t have any baking features? Am I just missing something obvious? I hope so, because this is a big tease, hehe.
Well looky what I found:
http://forum.illuminatelabs.com/viewtopic.php?id=194
Maybe there’s some kind of issue with this in terms of how Unity is using Beast?
Also found this:
http://www.pipelinefx.com/support/docs/Jobtypes.html
A lot of the Beast XML settings are formatted after Maya, so that would suggest a possible fgIgnoreBumpMaps setting. I added it to my settings file and am baking now. Here goes…
If it were that easy, someone would have likely worked it out months ago and mentioned it. So it probably doesn’t work.
