Baked + Real-Time Shadows

I have an outdoor scene with a single directional light and am using forward rendering and using Unity Pro.

I was planning on using baked shadows for the terrain, tree, structures, etc and using real-time shadows for the characters.

What is the best way to achieve this?

Um, what's the politest way to say rtfm? :-)

Read these first, try some stuff -- if it all works, awesome, come back and answer your question so we can all benefit from your new-found knowledge ... if it doesn't, not to worry, come back with specific questions. Good luck!

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Lightmapping.html http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Shadows.html http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/lightmapping-in-maya

If you wanna use realtime shadows together with beast lightning you need light that lights aren’t going to bake.
So choose the light that you want to make the realtime shadows and make sure it is realtime only in lightmapping options. And make sure your object is not static and that the lights shadow type is either soft or hard and strength is enough to make shadows visible.
There should be more information about this matter. http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/LightmappingInDepth.html

So after many moons of trying to figure this out, I got it to work.

In the lightmapping settings, click the “forward rendering” checkbox. I guess the shortcoming of this is that other lights won’t cast shadows, but if you are happy with the one dynamic directional light and the rest baked lights with no shadows then it’s a solution. It’s works for my project.

The short answer is, as far I know, you can't. In my testing, as soon as you lightmap geometry using Beast, realtime shadows no longer work. I would love for someone to prove me wrong.

However, you can use dual lightmaps, which will smoothly blend between your lightmaps and your realtime shadows. This is nice, but often times your lightmapped shadows will look much better, or at the very least, different, from your realtime shadows.

“In my testing, as soon as you lightmap geometry using Beast, realtime shadows no longer work. I would love for someone to prove me wrong.”

OMG, was going crazy with this one but think I’ve got the solution…I baked a lightmap on my terrain and then couldn’t enable realtime shadows again after that–even if I disabled lightmapping. Saw your comment and tried the same with another object–yep, after baking a lightmap, I couldn’t ever get a realtime shadow from that object again. UNTIL…

I selected my object that lost realtime shadows ability, went under Lightmapping > Object > Atlas, and changed the Lightmap Index to “255”, matching the other objects I hadn’t lightmapped…

It works! Real-time shadows are back.

Note you must have “Static” enabled for the object in question to make this change, but then you can un-check Static again afterwards.

Just anyone looking this now there is ‘‘Mixed’’ mode in Unity 5 that allows baked shadows and realtime shadows for dynamic objects on one light!