Just wanted to get some clarification on lightmapping and the newly released, Unity 2.0.
From what I understand, you can bake a lightmap for terrain directly in Unity 2.0. What about baking lightmaps for meshes (that have 2nd UV channels) directly in Unity 2.0?
It seams counter-intuitive to have to setup your lights in both your 3d app and Unity. Not to mention the shear hassle of baking lightmaps in a 3d app should lighting change.
If this is the case, does Unity support static vertex shadows?
Not answering your question per se, but IMHO you will always want to light your geometry in a 3D application first - at least until Unity does radiosity, ambient occlusion etc. in realtime.
Thanks for the reply. I’m using the Unreal Engine 3 for work and have gotten accustomed to its built in light mapper. Simply bring in a second UV channel, flag the mesh for a light map and its resolution and Unreal handles the rest.
I assume Unity will import lights, no? Or atleast the position of them? I guess I do the lighting in my 3d app, then import the light positions and set them up.
I think for now I’ll stick w/ a single directional light w/ dynamic shadows and just use some point lights for fill light. Keep it simple.
Just to throw a spanner in the works, I have a slightly different question but similar…
Is static vertex shadows and vertex light baking just “lightmapping”?
Ive seen terms like these shaders off the wiki:
AlphaVertexColor - A transparent vertex lit shader that takes per-vertex colors into account.
BakedVertexColorLighting - Like lightmapping only the lighting is precomputed in the vertex colors
VertexColor - A vertex lit shader that takes per-vertex colors into account.
VertexColorParallaxBump - Like the builtin Diffuse Parallax Bump, only takes vertex color into account as well.
So what are vertex colours? is it something to do with vertex painting/weighting? Is there some underlying way to apply info to a mesh that is deeper than just applying shaders and textures?
It’s when each vertex (point) has a color assigned to it in your 3D app. Obviously you can’t have any level of detail unless your mesh is made of lots of tiny polygons, but it’s useful for general shading, among other things. (For example, the tree swaying in 2.0 is done with a shader that uses vertex color information, I believe, so in that case you don’t see any colors, but the shader uses vertex color info to do its thing. i.e., bend this branch a lot if the color is one thing, or bend this part of the trunk just a little if the color is something else.)
In Blender, you just use the Vertex Paint mode. You can also bake lights on the vertex colours, so you get a lot more posibilities for playing with shaders inside Unity
