Should I upgrade from unity 3 to 4.3?

I started my project in UNITY 3.

In unity3 you cannot bake parts of your scene separately. I have a huge city model based on a real city, so I need to bake it step by step.

Someone said that it's possible to lightmap objects separately WITHOUT losing previous lightmap in UNITY 4.3 and above.
IS this True?

 

I would update to 4.6.

I still have a Project running in there. You can keep adding stuff to the lightmaps yes, there is a "bake selected" option.

I use 4.7 but a lot of stuf does break cause 4.7 entered when 5.x was mainstream so many plugins where not updated. Yet most of them just need to add the || unity4.7 thing.

 

First of all, I am not sure your license covers functionality in 4.3.
Secondly if it does, you should try the upgrade on a copy of your project not the original, and consider the alternative of upgrading to a modern stable version of Unity like 2017.2 - but only if the issue is not fixed otherwise.

 

Certainly I didnt get the license issue, if so, certainly makes sense to get to the latest stuff. Further, not sure how much will the Project breack when moving from 3 to 4.6 may be enough to consider the full rebump to 2017

 

Licenses cover previous versions of Unity pro but they don't go forward in time.

 

My license is for unity 4. I started in unity 3 free edition, then bought a Unity 4 Pro license.

Then I tried to upgrade(of course, I backed up the project first),
a lot of stuff seemed broken so Instead of starting to fix stuff, I went back to working in unity3.

 

It'll probably only work on desktops at this point, maybe an android. I can't see it working on iOS or consoles this far along. You'd need to get onto 2017 at a minimum.

Too many changes for mobile in recent times.

 

Im not building for IOS so thats okay. Anyway is unity 4 graphics overly superior to unity3?

I use the Hard Surface shader pack which I really like and it does no longer work in 4. I don't think there are any good free alternatives made for Unity 4.

 

No, not much. It's the same shaders mostly. The best visuals so far are in 2017.1 onward, but that requires a totally different workflow and thinking (PBR).

Also Unity 5 was the version of Unity that removed beast so if you want to keep beast you have to look for the final version of 4.

 

Ok, thanks I think i've solved the separate baking issue, anyway. I use a script called Beast helper, modified it to work on dual lightmaps.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/release-beast-helper-dont-lose-old-maps-anymore.62095/

 

I would stay tuned to 2017 versión news cause the Otoy renderer is in the progress of being added to bake lightmaps. If they manage to make it work as Beast did in terms of easyness that could be a game changer for the ones relying on baked lighting.