Very good point. I thought it would be better with geometry since I'm working with a small texture I'd have to increase the UV size for the plane to get no pixelation. Its about 32 Tris
I find that this happens sometimes if there is a face that has no space on the UV map. For example, a triangle that has been mapped as a straight vertical line, or a single pixel, or something like that. It affects the faces around it as well.
Also with unity3's new renderer non-shadow casting per pixel lights are very cheap, vertex lights are probably going to be useless unless your working with a very low end target.
You don't have to go crazy small with your images. 300 pixels high makes it hard to see your work. I'd recommend just using JPG, and keeping it around 1920x1080 or so.
nice work! +1 to increasing the lightmap res, especially of the carpet. the mesh receiving the shadows is always the one need to be examined. the shadows of the chair for example are really pixelated, and they are on the carpet.. so check that mesh settings :]
Crazybump would be the route i would take, yeah. Be careful with this sort of thing however, woodgrain should be pretty subtle, you dont need to have detail in every pixel of your normal map.
Thanks for replying Sushi, My main concern was when unwrapping this, those extrusions aren't going to take up much pixel space and I was curious if the information in the texture would even be able to be seen.
your comparison has a lot more saturation and contrast in the wood and no AA on the sharpened version. It's also not composed the same. It's not really a fair comparison to say, sharpening with a 1 or 2 pixel radius high pass.
+1 3D Coat for low poly. Direct pixel painting allows you to paint directly onto a LOW polygon mesh without the need for many levels of subdivision. And most importantly photoshop projection!
One thing I've found more useful than a checker map is a texture of noise. It allows you to see exactly the pixel density and stretching, whereas problems can exist within the boundaries of a checkermap.