Should I bake lighting or keep it realtime if I want to turn it off later?

Graphics Lighting & Global Illumination
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Hi everyone,

I’m making my first game in unity (a horror game) and so far I’ve created the house using realtime point lights wherever needed, but the performance has dropped quite a lot because of the number of point lights and their shadows so I was thinking of switching to baked lighting. (Also keep in mind that my PC can’t really be considered powerful by any means).

So basically the game will start with all lights on and at some point they will all turn off and the player will be given a flashlight. My question is, is it possible to do this (turn them off) with baked lighting? With realtime lighting I’m pretty sure a simple script would do the trick but what if I have baked lights?

I know that baked lighting is used when the light sources aren’t going to be moving but is turning them off considered (technically) similar to “movement”?

I would love to hear your opinion about it,
Thanks.

2

Old thread, no clue whether it still applies but in case it helps: Disable baked lightmaps at runtime on mobiles

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No GI in a game makes it look ugly and flat and dark. It needs some kind of GI but the GI can be custom shader based.

Built in you can choose from precomputed realtime GI and baked GI.

Edit: a custom example would be PSX style vertex lighting

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Based on AndersMalmgren and rdjadu replies plus some more googling, I decided that I will probably bake a lightmap for the lights on and another one for the lights off and then switch them using a script that I found on Youtube.

The script: https://youtu.be/2dsGZt-kBAk?si=r9UdMlHpQ2M-34vk

I have no idea if it will work on a 3D project but I will let you know after I try it. (It might take a few weeks to get to that stage as I’m building some other in-game things now).

Edit: Any other suggestions are still welcome.

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If your target hardware can take the performance toll you can use mixed mode lights. Also mixed mode lights enable directional specular reflections which in my opinion is a must for realism.

Edit: mixed mode can be turned on and off in shadow mask mode.

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