Combine Lightmaps (Beast)

Unity Engine
1

Hi everybody,

since this is my first post in this forum I’d like to introduce myself. I’m coming from a 3D design background with some programming experience in Javascript, PHP, Actionscript and Java. The last couple of month I’m been developing more or less successful 2D Android games with Andengine. Now I’m ready to move to 3D and I’ve been learning this great engine for 2 month now.

Now my first questions in this forum (be gentle ;))

  • I’m starting to use lightmaps for my mobile game and it seems that the lightmap size is 1024x1024px by default and could only be reduced by overriding the texture options (e.g. Android). In case the lightmap is only filled with a few lightmaps the image isn’t cropped, but scaled in total. Am I right? Is there a way to change/avoid this?

  • The second issue is about having lightmaps in multiple scenes. It seems that beast generates one lightmap per scene. In case the lightmaps aren’t fully filled this would be a massive waste of memory. Is there a way of combining the lightmaps into one altas?

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Matthias

2
  1. if you overide texture size → Unity3d will reduce texture size to load into memory (resize, not crop) → just loss the quality, nothing disappear2
  2. Don’t worry about waste of memory, Beast already care about it :). Depend on texel setting, how much mesh, material… it will divide into many lightmaps, not just 1 as you though
3

Thanks for your answer. Yes, I think I understood, but what happens if I have 10 scenes with 10 lightmaps and on each lightmap there is still some empty (unused) space? That would waste a lot of memory (thinking mobile games), or not? Does Beast combine these lightmaps, or is there a way to combine the lightmaps manually to save some memory?

4

As I said, Beast control the uv2 for lightmap so I think nothing waste there
I don’t think there’s anyway to combine lightmap.
if you use lightmap as AO, you can share between scene