As the title says, my Unity baked shadows from a single stationary directional light in ShadowMask mode look bad when I switch from Standalone to Android target.
Comparison images are below. The first two images show what happens with the default texture import settings. The third image shows what happens when I modify the texture import type for the shadow mask to “Lightmap”. It’s closer, but no cigar, as overall the lighting becomes duller. All the targets need to match.
The shadows should be nice and soft, I am used the Baked Shadow Angle to try and achieve that. The Standalone ones don’t look like I want them to, but I have a separate thread about that here.
Windows Target with default shadowmask texture settings.
Looks fairly smooth. Shadowmask texture is in RGBA Half mode.
Android Target with default shadowmask texture settings
Butt ugly versus standalone. Notice also how different the shadowmask texture thumbnail looks, it’s format has changed from RGBA Half to RGBA 32 bit…
Android Target with shadowmask using Lightmap texture type
Smoother, but ground is too dark versus standalone. Format of shadowmask texture has now chaged to RGB 24 bit, thumbnail looks a lot closer to standalone target though.
This bug all but makes baked lighting on mobile useless Hopefully this can get fixed soon!
This is currently by design. The texture type format depends on the target platform due to performance reasons. But I’ve informed the developers and will keep you updated if there are any news. And as you reported in your other case, there seems to be a discrepancy with manually generated lighting and auto mode, that will also be investigated.
Hmmm, thats not great news at all. Our plans are to make heavy use of baked ligbting, but the quality of what I can achieve on Android just isn’t up to par at the moment. I have yet to test on iOS.
It would be better if we could choose the format and make the trade off for quality/performance on a per project basis, similar to setting uncompressed/compressed for other textures.
Either that or you guys just make it look good while retaining current performance
With regards to the other report you mention, I’m confused. I never use Auto mode, I always bake manually. All my recent bug reports have been using manual build mode. Can you clarify which issue you are referring to, please? I think there might be some crossed wires…
After checking out with our dev, we observed that the RGBM encoding format type is displaying incorrect results so it is a bug, we will try to address it as soon as possible.
Hopefully this can get fixed soon! 
