We would like to address two problems with the current automatic lightmap UV unwrapping in Shapespark:
- If some objects have too large area to be packed into a lightmap, the unwrapping fails with a generic message:
lightmap resolution too large. Set lightmap resolution to at most X, or decrease lightmap resolution for individual objects.
The message doesn’t indicate which objects failed to be packed. In majority of cases there is only a couple of objects in a scene that need to have the resolution reduced. Identifying these objects and suitable resolution requires manual tuning. - We see scenes, especially exteriors, with large number of lightmaps. Because lightmaps are the most expensive assets in terms of download size and GPU memory usage, such scenes can load slowly or fail on mobile devices.
To address these two problems we plan the following changes:
- If an object fails to be packed into a lightmap, the resolution of such object will be automatically reduced to the maximum resolution that works.
- The editor
Bake
tab will have a new setting:Max lightmaps
(default2
). If a scene cannot be packed into this number of lightmaps, the resolution of all objects will be reduced to the maximum value that allows the scene to be packed. - The editor
Objects
tab will show if any object had the lightmap resolution reduced and to what value.
It still will be possible to manually configure per object lightmap resolution.
Please let us know if you see any problems with the proposed approach. We aim to include these changes in April release.