Vacuo
May 15, 2015, 2:54pm
16
I would agree with everyone here that large lightmap resolutions are not the best solution. You’re looking at a large overhead for that lightmap texture compared to using a lower resolution.
For something like foliage I would recommend at the very least using stationary lighting with a set distance for your cascaded shadow maps (default is 0 for Stationary Directional light). By using a Stationary Directional light you have your tree sway with the wind and still have a baked shadow on the ground that doesn’t need to be really high resolution. You can set the Dynamic light distance to something between 5000 and 10000, maybe lower than those numbers, so that when you’re within range the dynamic shadows will be used.
I would recommend using as low a lightmap resolution as possible on everything in the game. There have been very few instances where I’ve had to go over 512 or even 1024 for a lightmap resolution, and when I have it’s typically been a floor mesh that has been scaled. . The majority of my meshes will sit between 64 and 256 for the most part. UV layout is a big thing here as well to make sure you’re using the space efficiently to get the most out of your UV space.
For a side project I’m working on for world lighting setup and modular pieces I have a very large lobby with a floor and ceiling piece that only use a 512 Lightmap resolution.
For size reference the piece is ~2600x1700 units.
I hope this helps.
The part with setting dynamic light distance helped me a lot. Now it works like I wanted, thank you Mr. Hibson. <'3.
