Since upgrading to Unity 4.0, the automatic lightmap atlasing process no longer packs the UV islands together efficiently. I create all my lightmap UVs outside of Unity and there is often empty space in the [0,1]x[0,1] UV square. The docs say this about it…
“If a UV set for a given object occupies only part of the [0,1]x[0,1] square, in many cases atlasing will move neighboring UV sets closer, to make use of the empty space.”
This worked fine in Unity 3.5 but no longer works for me in Unity 4.0. Is this known to be broken or am I doing something wrong?
Here’s a before and after…
While not as severe as your example, im getting really weird chunks of inefficient UV layout that i can't get rid of. ![While not as severe as your example, im getting really weird chunks of inefficient UV layout that i can't get rid of.][1] [1]: http://i.imgur.com/v3qjykT.png
I make the UV2 of some meshes in maya, and when in unity 3.5 the atlasing for beast worked just fine.
But now I’m using unity 4, and with the same parameters I’ve got almost one LM for each object, with just a very small part in the texture used. So I’ve got more than 60 10241024 LM, with only 128128 pixels used sometimes. And for this object I’ve got the message “Object’s size in lightmap has reached the max atlas size”. Witch is obviously not the case when I look onto the lost of space in the LMs…
And as I see in the thread, no new answer since a year... Not very efficient for a huge problem that impact very badly many productions (I've heard that studios where making their own atlaser because of this bug...) I've posted an answer in the thread, maybe we would have a return if we shake the team a little... [My own LM][1] [1]: http://aynis.free.fr/BC/LM_bug.jpg
While not as severe as your example, im getting really weird chunks of inefficient UV layout that i can't get rid of. ![While not as severe as your example, im getting really weird chunks of inefficient UV layout that i can't get rid of.][1] [1]: http://i.imgur.com/v3qjykT.png
– mkingery_1