[U3b4] - Externally generated lightmaps

Unity Engine
1

Short form: What’s the syntax to add lightmaps to the list of Beast lightmaps via scripting? What’s the syntax to change the lightmap index for an object via scripting?

Longer form:
Okay, so I have a fairly large scene created in Maya, and I’ve already got a bunch (like, many hundreds) of lights placed and configured correctly. Baking lightmaps in Maya is kind of a pain, and Beast is very shiny, so I spent a couple days trying to get the lights to import to Unity so I could bake lightmaps with Beast, but the settings are just too different. Maya settings for intensity and penumbra just don’t seem to map directly to Unity settings. So, I gave up on that, and I’m back to baking my lightmaps in Maya, but I still want to make use of the rest of the new Beast features in Unity.

So… I’ve got several hundred lightmaps, straight out of Maya. I’ve got an AssetPreprocessor script which sets them all the be Texture Type: Lightmap on import. I now need to add them to the Lightmap array on the Maps tab of the Lightmap config dialog, and then go through all my lightmapped objects and set the lightmap index and atlasing info properly on the Object tab of the Lightmap config dialog. Since I have several hundred lightmaps (and they’re likely to change during the development process), I REALLY don’t want to do this by hand, but there’s nothing in the manual about this.

Help? Basically, I’ve got a bunch of lightmaps from Maya, and I want to use them with Beast instead of generating lightmaps with Beast. Doing this by hand is easy enough for a single lightmap is easy enough, but I really needing scripting access. Is this either in Unity, or will it be coming in a future beta?

2

Anyone have any ideas? This is a pretty major issue for trying to use externally generated lightmaps with Unity. :frowning:

3

Just as an update, U3b5 appears to solve the issue. The scripting documentation now includes LightmapSettings.lightmaps (the array of lightmaps) and Renderer.lightmapIndex (which lets you select one of the lightmaps in the array for a renderer).

I haven’t tested to confirm they WORK, but assuming they do, this solves my problem. Yay. :slight_smile:

4

It’s LightmapSettings.lightmaps, Renderer.lightmapIndex and Renderer.lightmapTilingOffset, but these were available since beta 1 both in the API and in the docs :wink:

Although it should be fairly easy to write a script that will automatically use lightmaps from an external lightmapper, I hope you’ll give Beast another go for your next scene :smile: