So, to begin, I’m not a big guru on the art side or anything, but I am slowly learning all that snazzy 3D art terminology.
Given a situation where you have:
- A block of terrain
- Imported models that won’t be animated (a house for example)
- A light source (sun) that is fixed
I’ve been trying to find more information on lightmaps, but what I’m curious about is if lightmaps can create shadows on the terrain from the static model placed on it. You don’t need real-time shadows for this sort of thing do you?
Hello!
You are totally right, you dont need to do real-time shadows on non-movable objects :).
That’s why you bake your shadows in your textures 
So you don’t loose performance doing unnecessary processing
Thanks for info!
Although, one follow-up question… is the baking typically done within the 3D modelling program of choice? Or can that be done through the lightmap generation on Unity’s terrain objects? Or both perhaps?
I’ve tried placing static objects on terrain, and then calculating the lightmap for the terrain within Unity, but this seems to only cast shadows from the terrain itself.
Hello!
I think its better doing it in your 3d modeler program, as it would export your textures as simple images, that way Unity will only need to assign the texture to your mesh