Thread by @glassbottommeg

Shout-out to @unity3d which has, for the third project running, completely screwed us out of baked lighting. Well done!

Culprit this time: we use a lot of baked proc-gen mesh. It exists as baked-out mesh assets. Unity just can't generate UV2 on those. It can only do that on FBX.

I'd just like to give the award to #unity3D here for "Most Technically Existent Tooling That Is, In Practice, Almost Universally Impossible To Apply To A Shipping Product". It's a true achievement. You should be proud!

Wait. God. Maybe. MAYBE.

We're seeing evidence of it MAYBE working on objects set to static. If that works everywhere, that could be it. Pleeeaaaaase.

THAT.

WORKED.

So it at least appears that it'll generate UV2 on mesh assets, baked, placed in a scene, IF they are marked static. The light map view looks right, at least.

We still need to test other stuff though.

- are they actually durable UV2 or a mirage
- can we bake light into them
- does the light bake survive SCM
- does the baking lighting still apply correctly if we slightly change the scene, or does it shred UVs if we touch anything
- etc

This appears to be the answer. Others using Houdini report that they process their exported mesh data with this (via an Editor script they made), and then that adds the UV2 properly.

https://twitter.com/dwenegar/status/1387227289734111233?s=19

Tech artist on porter side is trying this today, so CROSS FINGERS.

I'll be doing the work I was supposed to be doing yesterday, when I instead panicked and ran around screaming over whether we were screwed.

(sorry @aras_p)

I'm leaving this all up so maybe Google finds this for others. We kept hitting an empty void of really bad solutions that generated broken UV2, resulted in UV2 that would shatter when you rotated the camera, etc.

Also possibly handy for future readers:

https://twitter.com/logicalerror/status/1387292856142925825?s=19