Having some trouble getting the baked shadows to look any good on the stock Unity terrain. I am pretty familiar with the light baking system and I just can’t seem to get decent shadows on a terrain that is 2048x2048. Is that too big to bake good clean shadows?
I have tweaked every other mesh in the scene (1,000s) of objects and they all look beautiful and bake overnight. Approx 6-7 hours…lol. I got used to the time it took as it looked so good. I stepped up slowly from a quick 30 minute bake and then kept going up over the last few months. I have mainly been doing indoor scenes that I have modeled and authored all the UV so I know they were ready to bake but the terrain is much much harder to get looking even decent.
It says in the terrain component that it is breaking the terrain up into 64 pieces for baking but it sure doesn’t seem like it. If it was breaking it up into smaller chunks this would be working like I thought it should.
Can I somehow cut the terrain up into smaller pieces and bake those? I am developing for PC and not too worried about FPS. I am simply trying to get nice crispy baked shadows on the terrain and I will handle all the realtime shadows with probes and mixed lights. I also need to be able to edit the terrain in the future as I am still adding venues and areas throughout the early access version.
Any Asset store assets? Ideas? Im all ears.
The terrain was built with Gaia but is just a normal unity terrain.
Hey! One of our users was also facing the same issue here on the forums. I have already replied to the thread. Please take a look, as you might find some relevant information for your case as well - No shadows in baked static objects
Ok. I read that post and didnt really find an answer. It just says “you can try lowering the amount of bounces in the Lighting Settings. Also, you can try tweaking Indirect and Albedo intensity sliders.”
Wouldn’t that make the image appear non reality? I am using all PBR materials that I created in substance.
Whats the difference of a 512 and a 4k resolution on a lightmap? I am building for desktop. Can I get away with a 4k Lightmap. I have been baking with a 2k res and it takes all night. I am targeting a mid level PC Steam user. Is 4k too much for that?
You will have a hard time achieving well-defined shadows on a terrain, unless you will end up using 4K lightmaps. A better solution would be to rely on mixed lighting + shadowmask. You can read more about it here - https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LightMode-Mixed-ShadowmaskMode.html
I’ve been wondering the same thing. The only way I know how to approach it is to have the large gameobjects on the scene to be marked as non static so they can produce the shadows I want on the terrain. Of course that defeats the purpose of baked shadows on the terrain, but it will enhance those particular shadows.
Yeah I have just learned that if you want clean crispy shadows on a “larger” unity terrain you have to mark them as non static and take the realtime lighting hit. I am using a 2048 terrain and that is too big to get decent shadows. My bake times are around 5-6 hours now and produce 128 MB of maps.
I have also even considered getting rid of the Unity terrain in exchange for a mesh as that would bake better as I can make the mesh all smaller chunks to bake easier…but then I have to do the trees and grass all over again and that isnt happening… lol
