I have been using unity 3d for almost a year now and all of my scenes have been small and “live” lighting all arround. These have been webplayer or Standalone so memory is always in there for what I do. So I have opened my door to android and now i need to save all the memory I can. Flipping through the manual under Optimizing Graphics Performance I found the lightmapping section. Read the basic topic and advanced topic for lightmapping in the manual but when I bake my light maps my textures double which is understandable but my video memory also more than doubles and most important draw calls increase. So how does this make my game 2-3 times faster if it uses more of the resources I do not really have to play with. And when i build and run the game is 15fps at best where as I can get in the same scene with 5 “live” point lights almost 30fps constant. What am I doing wrong? Thank you all for any input.
Which shaders are you using for mobile? if it’s not the optimised mobile shaders, it will indeed be considerably slower.
Oh ok I am using almost all mobile vertex lit and a few custom shaders. So maybe that is the problem. What optimizes a shaders for lightsmaps? I will write some of my own and try it out. Is light mapping the way to go? Or am I wasting my time? To enlighten you I am working on a cave scene with torches for lights. So the scene has many small point lights. When I enter the light it only draws to my player when the scene is lightmapped correct?
the actual rendering of the lightmap needs to not be multi pass. Basically, you need to ensure it is all in one pass. for reference the mobile/unlit shader is pretty fast and supports lightmaps.
The actual hit of a proper shader for lightmaps is tiny - unless you’re targetting really old phones.
Has it occured to you to turn off those lights for the level, ie have them not affect the level after lightmapping? I ask because 15fps… you might be doing lightmap and lights. That would defeat the point.
Point lights are bad on mobile too…
After I lightmap I do leave the lights on for player lighting but they don’t effect the lightmapped textures anymore do they? If so then there is my problem. If I cut off the lights the textures are still lit and when I turn the lights back on nothing changes. Another question is I cannot bumpmap anything for Droid. Regular bumpmap shaders or mobile bumpmap shaders still nothing. Thank you for the help.
you need to set the culling mask for your light to exclude the lightmapped stuff (put them in a separate layer)