If you haven’t noticed, a lot of my posts are about optimization, or making your code run faster. So one of the things that keeps coming up is Beast Lightmapping. I’ve read a bit about, but I generally don’t know what it is, or how to do is for that matter. Is there a place to start learning how to do lightmapping in general?
Lightmapping is ‘baking realtime lighting into textures’ so you don’t need realtime lighting. Thats significantly faster.
And all you need to do is mark the object for generation of a secondary UV set if you don’t provide one, then opening the lightmap editor and bake it (as well as naturally having lights in the scene that are auto or bake lights)
If you own unity pro you can even do things not possible with realtime lighting (light emitting meshes through self illum shaders as well as light bouncing from surfaces and global illumination).
The lighting calculation as you might know it from rendering of still images and movies in 3D software is ‘lightmapping’ too in a wider sense, in case you have experience in that field
This set of tutes http://www.i3dtutorials.com/tutorial/84_next-gen-game-development-with-unity3d-volume-i will teach you what you wish to know. Really good tutes and easy to follow.
Agreed, great tutorials, and I don’t fall asleep listening to them like I do with many others, so thats double win.