Why do people use powers of two (32,64,128) for light map resolutions? I see in a lot of tutorials and content examples that the meshes’ lightmap resolutions are never anything other than a power of two. I have looked online at why this is but have yet to find an answer.
My current workflow is to use any size that looks right in the light map density preview, so I just want to know that I am not making any mistakes with this workflow. Thanks for looking
I can’t say that it is absolutely mandatory to use pow2 sizes for lightmap resolution for individual meshes. In fact in certain cases, you might be better off not doing and going for arbitrary size, but for general case, pow2 size ensures best possible packing of individual objects into lightmap texture. That said, if you are setting lightmap size for the object at 500, it would consume equal texture space as the object with size set at 512.
Having pow2 lightmap size for an object just ensures best possible texture space usage within the lightmap atlas. Nothing else.