LightMapToVertexColor

LigthMapToVertexColor, as its name suggests, is not a global illumination plugin. Its job is to decode the colors of the baked lightmaps as if they were in the shading phase, and write them into the vertex colors of the mesh, all of which happens within the editor, and in practice, you just need to read the vertex color information and calculate the shading! This will save you the cost of loading lightmaps and memory. Risk always comes with opportunity! It has advantages and disadvantages.

Advantage:

1. There is no need to load lightmaps and consume memory

2. The performance impact is minimal,

3. Support most platforms as well as devices

4. Bound with lighting information, you can optionally load the prefab in the scene without losing the lighting information (Unity prefab does not have lightmap information by default, and creating the prefab directly instead of loading the whole scene will lose the lightmap)

5. High compatibility, no conflict with other features (it only occupies the RGB channel in the vertex color information)

Flaw:

1. A certain number of vertices is required to have good results

2. Vertex colors can only carry a single set of lightmap information (for example, day and night, or multiple scenes, you can only choose one set of lighting information to pass to the vertex color, however, there is a solution to output multiple meshes to solve such problems)

3. The best baking solution for this plugin is to bake indirect light (because indirect light is low-frequency information, you can get good results with a small number of vertices)

Unsupported:

Directional mode (experimental)

ShadowMask (you can't use ShadowMask-related features, but you can pass lightmaps from ShadowMask baked mode)

Lightmaps for UVs baked outside of UV2 are rendered to vertices (to be supported later)

Platform support:

Theoretically, as long as your platform supports vertex color and accesses vertex color information in the shader, you won't be restricted.

Depend：

LTVC relies on the Unity FBX Exporter package！

Please note that especially on platforms using HDR lightmaps, since HDR uses a 16-bit floating-point format to store color values while vertex colors only use 8 bits. Therefore, when transferring it to vertex colors, the colors usually have flaws, color differences, and especially the loss of details in bright or dark areas. Although the plugin provides some solutions to improve this to some extent, it still cannot be compared with HDR lightmaps. This is the difference in format precision and has nothing to do with the plugin itself. (The Baked Indirect or ShadowMask baking modes are less affected by this problem because the lightmaps they generate only store low-frequency information such as indirect lighting.)

Support:

Whether it is a question, feature request, or suggestion, please contact the email:[email protected] or Discord 。

Licensing Information ：

"1k followers milestone" (https://skfb.ly/6XVw8) by Warkarma is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Modified information: Modified some meshes, and baked lighting in Unity to demonstrate LTVC

Please note that the "1K Followers Milestone" demo scene is not included in this pack, it is only used to make a promotional poster! (If you are interested, you can check the link to the file in the license agreement)

The sample scene was made in Unity 2021.3, and if you open this scene in a different version, you'll need to import the corresponding version of the shader pack provided for you in LTVC!

Before you get started, we recommend that you read the documentation included in the package!