I’ve been away from Unity for a while now, but I have previously created a game with terrain, objects and lightmaps in Unity 2.5 (Mac) on terrains with no problems.
I’m on my PC now and using Unity Pro 2.6.1 and I have a problem creating terrain shadows, heres what happens.
Create a new terrain, throw in a couple of big hills and big cube, check cast shadows in the terrains inspector and hit create shadowmap with lighting set to lightmap, also checked the shadows box in the popup. now first time round it takes a long time (as expected) to create the shadowmap, it works as expected with terrain shadows and shadows from the cube.
Now if I edit the light by rotating it and repeating the process as above then the creation process of the shadowmap is way way shorter and no longer creates a shadow for the terrain, only the cube is included.
The only way I’ve been able to create a shadowmap for the terrain and object is the first time you create the shadowmap for that particular terrain, after that I can’t get the terrain to cast a shadow.
If I delete the entire terrain from the project and create another the same thing happens again consistently.
Hours ago i have noticed the same problem by me, is exact the same her. I wonder me why the shadow is exactly the same but my Lightsource are on the other side from the Terrain. Dont find a workaround now.
Ok, I can reproduce this on XP. But I found an easy workaround for now. Simply delete the Terrain from the Scene and add it back in from the Project. This, at least for me, made it cast shadows again.
The Terrain is an asset that is part of your Project so that you can use it with many scenes. So just delete it from the scene and add it back in at the same position and the lightmap will work again.
It’s not about the OS. Those are two different Unity3D versions - except if you’re emulating Windows on the Mac that is.
Seriously guys, just quit that built-in terrain. Its in-game performance sucks so much that it’s unbelievable… Have you ever tried running an SSAO shader with one of those things in the scene? gee…
I don’t use the Unity terrain, I decided to go for it like any other model.
Under a point it’s not so elastic for developing maps (you mostly must adapt the gameplay to the terrain, which is fixed after you make it, and you only change it if really necessary) but under other points I have support for any shader, I can slice it where I want, I can make holes and caverns… there are many pro and only a couple of vs.
Overall, I think that the terrain system as it is now is quite limited (but fast in render) and only good for some types of games.
The terrain is made to be used for expansive terrains where a single model would by way too big.
The key to great game graphic creation is a mix of optimisation and faking it, the first mistake many people make is throwing every shader and effect in there, then blame the engine for bad performance.
Back on point, is there a fix in the pipeline for this issue?
probably doesn’t help everyone tho…