So ive been using baked lighting for my indoor scene. I want to be able to turn the lights between on and off. I know this is a common thing, but I’m dumbfounded. I cant get realtime light looking nearly as nice. Does anyone know how people usually go about making good light that can be switched to make the scene dark? Thanks
What I have seen done in games like Call of Duty is they bake multiple different lightmap variations, then combine them together at runtime when lights are shot out / turned off.
I think this wouldn’t be too difficult as you would just store multiple lightmaps then blit them together at runtime. The problem is that they then wouldn’t be compressed textures (AAA games sometimes use GPU based texture compression for stuff like this). Another option is to just store multiple sets of lightmaps (one for each combination) and swap them appropriately at runtime. The issue here is that with more than a few lights your memory use from lightmaps will explode.
I know Bakery has an option to bake out per-light lightmaps, and you can get them from your Temp folder (ask Bakery guy, Mr F more about this). So at least you won’t have to bake multiple times.