[freezy]

Insert bakes were the bulk of a table's diff: InsertBakeData kept its UVs and tangents as Vector2[]/Vector4[], which Unity writes as one YAML line per triangle corner. A ringed 1" insert's bake was 23k lines and 1 MB of text.

Compact UVs and tangents

• Each distinct UV and tangent pair is saved once (8 bytes: UV in 16 bits per axis, tangent in 8 bits per component with the sign), plus a 16-bit index per corner (32-bit past 65,536 distinct pairs), all as byte[], which Unity writes as one hex line.
• 8-bit tangents are as fine as the 8-bit normal map baked against them; 16-bit UVs are 1/64 of a texel at 1024 px. The UV grid is a power of two, so halves and quarters stay exact.
• Uvs and Tangents stay as they were for the baker, TryApply and the packaging payload. On save they take the stored precision in place, so what the insert wears is what's saved, before and after a reload.
• Old bakes are read through FormerlySerializedAs and take the compact form on their next save.

The LookDev bakes: 1.04 MB to 88 KB for the rings, 23k lines to 30 for each.

Eight-bit optical maps

• Optical Normals are baked in 8 bits, like the normal map.
• Optical Response is baked in 8 bits with the sRGB curve and imported as sRGB, so the GPU decodes it back to linear without shader changes. Plain linear 8 bits would err by up to 9% in the glow's dim tail; with the curve it stays within 2.2%.
• Together the LookDev maps went from 23 MB to 5.5 MB. Before/after renders of three showcase inserts, lit and unlit, differ on under 0.1% of pixels by more than 2 levels, with the renders themselves reproducing exactly.

The HDRP exporter records the response's colour space from the texture (VisualPinball/VisualPinball.Unity.Hdrp#30), so older 16-bit linear maps keep exporting as linear.

Tests

• New InsertBakeDataTests: a compact save and read round trip, and reading a bake in the old form.
• All 1,982 insert edit-mode tests pass in the HDRP project, and both Blender suites (test_bake_insert.py, test_insert_optics.py) pass in Blender 5.2.

[greptile-apps]

Confidence Score: 5/5

[Medium impact] The PR appears safe to merge; both previous findings are addressed and no new actionable issue was found.

Summary

The PR stores insert UVs and tangents as compact bytes and switches optical maps to eight bits.

• Insert bakes save compact corner data while keeping the same arrays available.
• Insert optical maps use eight-bit data with the response decoded correctly.

Diagram

%%{init: {'theme': 'neutral'}}%%
flowchart LR
  A[UVs and tangents] --> B[Quantized unique pairs]
  B --> C[Eight-byte records and corner indices]
  C --> D{Check sizes and indices}
  D -->|Valid| E[Restore UVs and tangents]
  D -->|Damaged| F[Keep generated mesh]

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