Unity External Lightmapping Tool NO.4 – results

06Sep09

It’s been a while since the first post about the lightmapping tool (even the name evolved to a more general one ) and I handed out the system to Unity a week ago. Now the mentors are making from it a neat package and adding some example assets and I myself am making the documentation better and trying some weird stuff to make the system working even better.

I don’t want to make a false start so I won’t post the final Unity package till it’s not on their website but I’ll share a lightmapping example with you that with probably be in the system documentation.

 

The scene before lightmapping

Using the tool you can prepare lightmap texture atlases in Unity, simply by dragging the objects to the chosen lightmap.

Once you’ve chosen your objects press “Export Scene” button

The scene gets exported to 3dsmax (also with Unity lights), where waits for you the External Lightmapping Tool helper.

After you adjust the scene lightning in 3dsmax, this little tool will render and save the lightmap textures to your Unity project directory and apply the lightmaps automatically.

In 3dsmax you can use regular “CTRL+S” shortcut to save your materials and lightning for future changes

After the rendering is complete you can come back to Unity and see the results.

Whenever you’ll have to rebake your scene (objects or lights in scene moved), just press the “Export scene” button again.

The tool will reload the scene in 3dsmax at the point you’ve leaved it at last save.

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Filed under: Projects, Unity, Vray-Unity tools   |  4 Comments
Tags: lightmapping, mental ray, tool, Unity, vray