The thing I was thinking about is not possible in CE. At least without access to shader source. As it require more customized materials per object. Default materials doesn't support RGBA spliting, and vertex painting can be hardly used to mask anything useful in current shader setup.
Apply a "Matte/Shadow" material to the sphere (or anything else you want to knock out of the scene). I think Matte/Shadow defaults to capture shadows which can be a pain if you want a solid knock out so be sure to uncheck "receive shadows" in the material properties.
Black acts as a mask, so those areas wont get painted. You're left trying to project white polypaint from the spotlight image onto the model, which you probably wont see unless the model is filled with some color other than the default white.
make sure you're using a default program matereial, like a blinn or phong, not any dota textures. Also make sure both LOD0 and LOD1 are using the same one. If you use Material #01 in the editor, use that for both LOD's and you won't have an issue.
many devs buy assets to use them as placeholders so I don't think character artists are screwed by default. I suspect that what sells best is character packs that are tailored towards some very common indie genre and use classes or archetypes that are standard in that genre.
i kinda think you should change your system/display units so you can work at a non-microscopic scale. the default for this setting is like, 15. but if you can't do that then you can still instance your model and scale it up just for screenshots
Try Light-Toggleable or Moveable instead, from what I understood, you want 2 lights to interact with your assets? In which case, by using default lights, you can't. Also, make sure you models cast double-sided shadows, so there is no leaking.
Diagnosed the problem. The material definitions are editable while things are initially zipped up by default, but after the material is unziped, the material definition is uneditable. This includes re-zipping and re-unzipping, the materiel definition is no longer touchable. And this sucks when the material has to be…
The normals are facing outwards, so they're being culled. Most reliable method is to flip the normals in your 3D app. But you can also edit the shader to have Cull Front rather than the default Cull Back. http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-CullAndDepth.html
You can do this in 2016. As a workaround you can probably create a copy of the un-shrinked mesh and create a blendshape and add the shrinkmesh as target. You can now shrinkwrap the original and paint the weights of the blendshape deformers on the other mesh to blend between the default and the shrinked state.