What’s the best way to pre-bake lights into unity for static meshes and is there a built-in lightmap baker in Unity ?
If you own Max and find yourself occasionally purchasing plugins, I highly recommend Flatiron from 3dio. http://flatiron.3d-plugin.com/
It’s really very handy. You can select a bunch of meshes that you want to share a UV map, hit a button, and it will unwrap the lot onto one map( the, If you already have your lighting set up, select what pass you want baked and the channel and hit the button…done.
B.
I guess there are 2 ways. I use Maya and I either bake lightmaps using the light only option and then combine them with the texture in unity, or I bake light and color and then use a pure white light map and the baked map as my texture. Light maps are good because you can combine them with repeating textures for more detail. The problem is the light maps can’t seem to make a texture brighter than the source, only darker, so if I have an area that’s blown out I use a light and color bake as a texture. Maybe someone has found a way around this. Anyway if you are using Maya go to batch bake, I think it’s in the render section…
Sure, thanks ! I’m using Max so I’ll check the plugin out !
I have a similar question.
I use Maya, but I’m not too well versed in baking light maps.
But I suppose the main challenge I have is that I don’t know how to import light maps into Unity.
Sure, I bake a light map in Maya and then have a nifty TIF file with light map information. What do I do from there?
I’ve heard stuff about making layered shaders, but I’ve got a ton of different textures that are all combined into one object. And even if I were to separate the object into all its individual parts and change each one to a layered shader, I wouldn’t know what to do with the light map. It doesn’t sound right to include it as a diffuse texture.
So yeah, I could use some help.
…and I see that you could change material type in Unity to lightmapped.
haha. I guess I don’t need help.