Lightmap and texture baked into one image

Questions & Answers
1

Hey!

I’m new into working with lightmaps and textures. I’m working on a mobile game and want good performance. I use Blender for baking the lightmaps (as I have Unity Free). I realized that you could bake it all together, textures, AO, and shadows into a single image and then use it as a normal texture on the mesh (with a simple diffuse shader for example). Is this an alternativ way to go? What pros comes with doing a seperate image just for the lightmap?

Best regards
Marcus

2

Unity free can bake the lightmaps just fine. And you can tweak them as well.
The bad thing is that it brakes dynamic batching. If you combine the lightmaps into the textures though and just load a single texture on your model, you won’t brake dynamic batching and if your meshes meet the requirements they will be batched together to reduce draw calls.