Hello,
I am working on a game which aims at very low hardware requirements, therefore I am using forward rendering limited to only 1 pixel light at any given time. All other scene illumination is strictly baked in.
I have recently started building the decoration of a small town we will be having, and I have noticed that the trees I am placing with a terrain paint tool end up being either totally black, or so dark that they as may well be black.
You can see the problem here. Funny thing is that the distant sprite representations are either pitch-black or insanely bright. I am yet to determine which causes this.
I am using a few trees from the “Terrain Assets” bundle, namely scone pines and such. Unlike other people who I googled out to have similar problems to mine, even when I manually drag the tree prefab into the scene it still remains completely dark. Using a new point light does illuminate the tree but to a far lesser degree than it does other scene objects.
I have found the problem to be the Soft Ambient Occlusion bark/leaves shaders. I have switched the shaders to SpeedTree variant (which are beautifully implemented, by the way, tons of options), however I constantly get warnings in my console that the trees should use Soft Occlusion shaders. Can this warning be suppressed?
So I finally got me thinking, how much of an advantage really is painting the trees using a terrain tool, versus simply manually placing the trees in the scene? I am aware it would take slightly more time, but given that each tree would be it’s own mesh with Lightmap UVs generated, with a baked-in lightmaps it could look fairly beautiful - given that they do not more and are not animated, which in my case they are not.
Furthermore, I have found that terrain-painted trees do not cast lightmapped shadows in any way, even if their direct prefab equivalent does.
You can clearly see the difference here.
In any event, using the light probe options at the prefab and terrain settings does not appear to cause any difference in any scenario.
Am I approaching this right? How can I have optimized and batched trees that cast lightmapped shadows and accept 1 pixel light? This is currently a decoration around a town but later I plan to build several forest setting levels and trees painting tool could really help.
Thank you in advance for your help!
