Realtime VS Baked: Low-Poly

Unity Engine
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I’ve just started working on a new project, and from experience in my previous projects, I decided to stick with one of the most basic of modelling styles (low-poly).

And I’m currently really torn between what lighting setup I should go with. I did some digging, and found this. It says that Baked lighting is heavy on RAM and general storage space, while Real Time lighting is heavy on GPU and sometimes on CPU aswell.

So which would be better for a game with absolutely no textures, just plain colours straight from the unity materials, and increadibly low poly counts?

I’m asking because I don’t have a clue about what exactly those two (RAM and CPU) are used for when rendering and running games (which is used for animations, running code, etc). So I don’t know which of them a “low-poly/voxel” hybrid would be more demanding of.

I wanna narrow this down even more. It is going to be a sidescroller, with a 100% fixed camera rotation, much like Little Big Planet (if I’m remembering correctly), so there isn’t going to be that much rendered at a time. I will be using a lot of post processing effects (and a lot of different ones), as well as volumetric lights.

I know all these things contribute hugely to rendering which is done by the GPU, but I don’t know if that’s the only thing that largely handles those types of things.

And I also want to ask something actual graphics-wise. Basically, am I limiting myself in some way by choosing one over the other? As in, if I were to pick baked, would it be harder to have both dark and bright scenes (no day/night cycle) look the same in terms or style and feel? Or would it not really make a difference?

Also, I’m making a PC game, so neither CPU nor RAM should be an issue. I just want to make sure I balance it out, rather than the game demanding insane CPU power when the potential player has a lot of RAM but a very weak CPU.

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I’d say, if you can get away with baked, do that. You’ll free up GPU time at the expense of some memory. And that’s what memory is for. With if you can get away with it, I mean that realtime can handle any type of animation correctly, while baked lighting is basically static and doesn’t adapt to the animation.

In terms of balance this also makes sense. You are not using any textures now, so there’s plenty of space. And the GPU already has the post processing and object shading to do.

Baked is static, but you can modify this based on a general daylight color setting.

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I think this is one of the most important points in reference to what lighting/shadowing solution to use. If going to PC I think your options are unrestrained.
However another point to consider is HOW MUCH will the environment be animated? Specifically if everything in the scene will be moving and animated and doing things - baked lighting will probably not work.
But combining both is also an option. :sunglasses:

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