How can I bake shadows in a scene that appear when I turn off the light in game?

Hi, I am trying to figure out how to setup my lighting to achieve a certain effect. I have a 3rd person game where the user can enter different areas. Some areas are underground and I want the area to be totally black (no lighting) except for a radius around the player. The lighting itself works. I just set the Environment Lighting to black and only have a Spot light that follows the players. BUT, I also want to pre-bake some fake shadows into the scene to give it more life, using a Directional light. I know the shadows won't be correct in game since the shadows won't match the spot light, but that is fine.

This is current setup:
I have Environment Lightning set to black. Baked global illumination ON. Lighting mode shadowmask. I have a (mixed) Directional Light that I only use when baking the scene. I bake the scene and get all the shadows in the editor like I want. When the game starts I deactive the directional light. This turns the scene black, light I want. I then have a (real time, no shadow caster) spot light that follows the player around and illuminates the area around him as a torch.

But the problem is: when I turn off my directional light, the shadows that was baked from it dissapears in the scene as well! Is there a way to turn off the light, but keeping the shadows it contributed with in the baked shadow map?

This is how it looks in the editor after baking:

I have shadows baked like I want to.

But this is how it looks in game after I have turned off the directional light that created the baked shadow:


If I turn on the directional light again in the game, the shadows appear (although brighter due to the spot):

But when I turn on the directional light the whole area gets visible for the player which I don't want to.

Does anyone know how I can achieve this effect? A "torch lit area, with pre baked shadows".

Thanks!

 

Thanks for the answer. But if I use baked indirect lighting mode, my shadows won't get baked, right? From what I understand, indirect lighting mode will only bake indirect shadows/colors and not the shadows. Is that correct?

I understand that the behaviour is intended. It makes sense and is probably what you normally want. I just wanted to come up with a solution that didn't use any real time shadows. But if it isn't possible out of the box, I might go with indirect baking on the directional light like you say, and use real time shadows on the spot light.

 

Adding to this again. I tested with indirect baking mode but it still gives me the problem that I cannot make the scene go dark when I turn off the directional light.

This is the effect I want. When I turn off the directional light and only use the spot, I get this torch like feeling:


But when I use the directional light as fully baked and bake the scene, the light values get baked and I cannot get the scene to turn fully dark. This is how it looks when I have turned off the directional light after baking and using the spot:

 

Thanks for help everyone.

Kristjonas, I totally agree with you that the players will see that the shadows don't move. But this solution is intended for mobile devices with low quality settings. I will also use a real time lightning mode for higher quality settings.
I did some tests with just baking ambient occlusions from a skybox (no light sources in the scene, just a skybox, baked indirect mode). It really does help to "ground" the items. But I still cannot make the scene go completely black when I do it like that. I was hoping I would be able to change the scene environment lightning after the baking, but that wasn't the case. I guess I need to use post processing like you say if I want to continue down this path. I could probably just write a shader that returns black pixels if they are too far away from the player.

uy3d, this sounds really interesting. This could be exactly what I am trying to do. I will test this as well and see how it goes. If I am "lucky", the spot will work as a mask for the directional light's baked data.

 

I just had to test uy3d's advice right away

This was fun. This is what I did:
I baked the directional light as mixed, shadow mask. At runtime I just gave the torch the bakingOutput from the directional light. And this was the result:

I know it looks terrible, the shadow is no way near realistic. But this is really something I can work with. I am thinking of combining this trick with Kristjonas advice. So I will try and bake the ambient occlusion with a really nice skybox and then hijack that lightmap and give it to the spot! In that way I can get baked AO using a realtime spot light.

This was really good help from the two of you. Thank you very much.

 

This was a bit harder than I hoped. I have been struggling with a way to access LightBakingOutput from the baked environment lighting. Maybe this is not even possible. But I was hoping I would be able to access the baking data from the environment lighting just as easy as I could access it on a regular light.

For regular light I can just access it like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. directionalLight.bakingOutput;

I can then use that information on my spot:

Code (CSharp):

1. torchLight.bakingOutput = directionalLight.bakingOutput;

Does anyone know if it is possible to get access to the baked information for the global illumination as well?