How do you choose how many lightmaps beast will create in one bake for your entire scene. From messing with settings ive got it down from 2 to 40… so what gives? How do i keep it down as low as possible. Because I dont want 40 1024x1024 textures hogging all my memory.
You don’t choose how many textures it is going to create. You choose how many texels it will have per unit, that value will define the resulting amount of textures: the higher, the more textures you need
I see in that case can you describe what the object properties of tiling and offset do…?
Objects don’t have a tiling and offset property.
But materials would have and it impacts the materials tiling and offseting of the texture used
im not talking about the materials. I am talking about inside the lightmapping editor… when you select an object… the very first tab gives you more settings… just like it gives more settings for a light… it gives you more settings for actual models… And those are the offset and tiling properties I am talking about.
Here you could modify the scale, should you want to increase or decrease the lightmap resolution for a single object. The offset and tiling properties will be overwritten by Beast.
If you enable option “Lock Atlas” you could specifiy the atlas as well as the number of lightmap textures and which texture is assigned to which object by yourself. I guess doing this manually will be a pain in the ass should you have more than a couple meshes.
An option to lock atlas only for specific objects would be a nice addition for a future release… at the moment there is a lot of stuff which can be improved in the new lighting system…
i honestly dont understand a word you just said to me. i udnerstand you can tile a texture normally in a material… but you dont tile lightmaps… so wtf 
and theres already a scale option so i dont understand what the point of these offset and tiling things are.
scale: this controls how lightmap uvs for given object will be scaled. You control global resolution only. But imagine you have something that needs more resolution then everything else - you scale uvs for that object (effectively upping lightmap resolution for this object only)
tiling and offset controls where are uvs for that object on lightmap - because you have uvs in [0…1] on your object - they need to be transformed into lightmap uvs.
So basically - don’t touch anything apart from scale ;-). And tune scale ONLY if you are really sure that specific object need to have more (or less) resolution that everything else
I have a specific object in my scene… i cant scale it past like .3 otherwise it shows up a warning saying ive reached the max scale for this object… why? Its just the walls for an apartment…