Hi all,
I’m happy with Beast over-all, but I was wondering if there’s something I’m missing in the setup of my scene.
It seems that if I use lightmaps, I no longer get any specular highlights on my surfaces.
Am I doing something wrong?
You need to add realtime lights to get specular effects, since they don’t look right when baked onto a texture (except in certain cases). There should be a lightmap shader that shows them once you’ve added a light or two, there is in 2.6.1.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that there’s not a “lightmap shader” that works for Unity 3 in the same way…
Is there’s something to do with Forward or Deferred Lighting I should know about?
Check out Geenz shader in the Showcase section. http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=63238&start=15
It makes specular and normal maps show even when only using lightmaps. It’s something I like a lot as my game is lit only with lightmaps.
Totally… I wish the normal shaders could do this.
I wonder if there’s a way to make shaders that do this using the Node based shader editor. Or is this a more fundamental solution (code based)?
Either way, the ability to use Normals and Spec maps in a lightmapped scene would make my life MUCH easier.
The Unity way is to use Dual Lightmaps - there’s some related info in the documentation. With dual lightmaps you’ll get bumps, specular and good shadow resolution close by from the realtime lights, while also getting awesome looking indirect lighting from the lightmap.
This is the only kind of lightmaps natively supported by Unity and we think it’s at least as good and often better than HL2 or UE3 style lightmaps, but time will tell what you guys think of it 
That Geenz shader uses either HL2 or UE3 style lightmaps, but as it is it won’t interact properly with realtime lighting, lightmaps will occupy a lot of space (these lightmaps need to have quite high resolution) and this scene is just a plane and a sphere. So while it’s a very cool tech demo (congrats! 
), I’m pretty sure you’ll have better experience using Dual Lightmaps for your game.
that’s great, thanks. I’ve implemented the dual lightmap system as you suggested, and it looks really nice.
Tell me, is there a way to increase the resolution of the real-time soft shadows beyond the current maximum? It’s quite jaggy in some places.
In quality settings. If it’s a directional light, also increasing the number of cascades helps.
If it’s a spot light, making the angle smaller helps as well, as then the same shadow map resolution is used over a smaller area.
Unfortunatly my scene has all those settings at maximum right now. Thanks though.
Have you had any luck fixing that Occlusion Culling bug I reported a while back?