Beast Lightmapping, cast shadow but not receive?

Unity Engine
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1

I’m working on a environment where we have a lot of glowing neon lights, I want to paint the building shadows on the texture but use beast lightmapping for the road and surrounding details.

But to get the buildings to cast shadows they are also baked into the lightmap and get shadows that look kind of bad going over the neon lights and so on.

So my question is, how can I make objects cast lightmapping shadows without receiving them? I could add some placeholder objects that cast shadow then remove them, but that would just be wasted lightmap texture space.

Here are a few images to show you guys what I’m trying to do.

Here you can see the lightmapping shadows go over the neon and somewhat removing the effect of the edge highlights.

This is a paintover of how I want it to look, basicly a unlit texture shader for the buildigns but shader with lightmapping support for the road.

2

You need to split those into separate meshes and exclude them from beast lightmap settings. Each separate object has it’s own ID. If it’s all the same mesh you can’t do it.

Another technique is to make point lights near the places you want to glow. That might look better. If its a horizontal glow, make a few lights and make a prefab from them.

3

They are separate meshes, how do I exclude the buildings, is that done after the lightmapping or?

4

It’s in beast settings. Go to lightmapping window and set how much space it uses in lightmap to 0, or uncheck static. you can always make it static again after the bake. It won’t lightmap anything that’s not static.

5

Lightmap scale 0 did the trick, thanks Hippo!