I am a novice at 3d currently examining various apps and work flows with which to create and utilized 3d content.
When creating a model in other 3d packages (I’m experimenting with Cheetah 3d) is it possible to import a scene’s lighting, or is the only way of transferring a carefully composed atmosphere via lightmaps? And how effective are lightmaps in reproducing ones scene as opposed to simply recreating the lighting within Unity itself?
You will never be able to recreate complicated lightning within Unity, using Unity’s lights alone. If you want to recreate the feeling of a complicated lightning setup from your 3D package, lightmaps is the way. And depending on the size of your scene, you will be able to come pretty close. It depends of the amount of objects in your scene, and the general scale of it as well.
Every 3D app has a different idea of how to do lights, so no, there isn’t a way to import them, aside from their physical location.
–Eric
No wonder I was unable to carry over lighting info from any of my test files (same with w3d files in Shockwave).
I’m assuming Lightmaps are in many ways similar to texture baking? - two ares I need to familiarize myself with.
Thanks!
they are similar up to a point but the main difference is that they are applied in realtime and for that reason they can be read out depending on the engine and setup to be used to influence objects standing on a dark lightmap area for example
A lightmap is basically just a texture that’s overlaid on top of the usual texture. Typically it’s much lower resolution (which is OK since it’s just for lighting, not detail), so you can have one lightmap texture cover a large area. You can read from a lightmap texture, but only if it’s uncompressed, just like any other texture. There’s a project using that technique here.
–Eric