I'm creating a procedural terrain system for Unity. And I'm looking for ways to efficiently cast self-shadows on it. If it wasn't procedural, I could simply bake a lightmap using Beast. But, I can't because the terrain mesh is created at runtime. What kind of methods can be done for this, I'm sure it has been done before. If possible, I'm looking for a solution that works for non-pro.
I was thinking that maybe some kind of onetime ray-tracing method might be a solution.
There isn't a way to bake lightmaps at runtime using Beast (Unity's lightmap engine). Beast only works in the editor. However, you can run editor functions from the command line using -executeMethod so if your procedural level was XML you could send it to a server, run an editor method similar to this (javascript):
static void PerformBuild () {
Lightmapping.Bake()
}
I didn't compile this yet, so it might not be all the code neccesary. Here are a few links that I used as a reference:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Lightmapping.html http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/gui-ExtendingEditor.html
