Lightmaps - In practice

Unity Engine
1

Hey there,
I’m having a bit of a dilemma regarding the lighting in my level. I’m currently working on converting a game made in the C4 Engine into Unity but I only have (or more precisely, will have in 3 days) the Indie license of Unity which doesn’t support real-time shadows. Coming from C4 (which has a completely dynamic lighting system) this will be quite a bit of adjustment for me.
What I’m trying to figure out right now is how to use Lightmaps. I know how to create them and apply them, but I can’t figure out when and where to use them without going crazy.
I’ll give you a more solid example. The screenshot linked below is a prototype of Level1 from our game:

Obviously, there are quite a few objects that will be added to this scene but my basic problem is this. If I light this scene in Unity with a single Directional light, you can imagine how bland that looks. I want the Directional Light shadows, which I can easily bake in Cinema4D into lightmaps, but my platforms are so huge, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to use high-res lightmaps to get anything to look decent. Another solution I can think of is to split the big pieces into smaller ones, but then I have to bake lightmaps for quite a few objects which is another hassle.

Is there an easier way to go about this that I’m not realizing?

Thanks.

2

to do what I think you want to do use pro or use a projector as in take a picture of the object in unity (Application.CatureScreenShot) then in photo shop figure out the angle of the light map change the main image to black the rest to transparent then import it back and project the image to the back of the object and you have shadows! and that is how to use it and also take the same image and in photoshop make it lighter then apply that as your texture for the object then add the directional light and there you go it looks the same (takes about 2 days to do it though 1 hour each day) so about 2 hours to do it.

3

It seems to me you have some very soft lighting in there.

Either it’s very soft AO-style lighting (which does not require hi-res lightmaps), or you have sharp edges. if you just make sure that your lightmap UVs have splits along your sharp edges, you should be fine.