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Can/Should I bake lightmaps in a completely dark room?
My scene is completely dark. Everything is static. I can bake light maps, but the only light source will be a realtime point light that the character moves around.
Can I use lightmaps? If there were lights in the scene that were baked/mixed, I wouldn't be asking the question, but considering there's only one light that is real time, what are my options? The main reason I'm asking is so I wouldn't have to use Ambient Occlusion as a post process effect, but just have it baked into lightmaps. Thanks!
Answer by FortisVenaliter · Jul 24, 2017 at 06:56 PM
As far as I know, real-time ambient occlusion is impossible with modern hardware, unless it's the screen-space pseudo-version (seen in Crysis, for example). And ambient occlusion requires a light source to be of any value anyway so...
I wouldn't bother baking. You'll just be adding a bunch of black textures to your final memory footprint.
That's what I was thinking. And the real time AO I am talking about is a shader that uses the depth pass from the camera to generate fake AO. It's included in the post processing stack. Thanks