High Qual Beast Lightmap Settings Guide

Hi all, after completing a lighting setup using Beast for an architecture simulation, I'd like to share the settings that seem to work beast, sometimes in contrast to the manuals recommendations.

Directional Light with .4 intensity to represent the sun

Mode - single lightmaps (I use FW)
Qual- High
Bounces - 4
Sky Light Int -.8
Bounce Boost - 1.2
Bounce Int - 1.1
Gather rays - 1500
Contrast threshold - 0.012
Interpolation - 0
Interpolation Points - 30
Ambient Occlusion - 0
Resolution - 100

I find the actual quality setting in Beast is the Contrast Threshold, which dramatically increases quality and time taken to bake. .01 and lower takes a huge amount of time 10+ hours for my scene, whereas .05 takes about 2 hours

Gather rays - need to be high but aren't critical
Interpolation isn't needed at all, and I find it actually introduces artifacts and unwanted shading at any level.
Occlusion - artistic preference, but given light bouncing, occlusion is the poor cousin, and takes away from realism
Resolution - Just as it states, pretty obvious

Setting the FBX import setting to have a UV bleed of 10+ is pretty critical for high res lightmaps, fixes all the bleeding issues.

I still get patches of blotchiness, and they seem to be in areas where the 4th bounce is hitting. I haven't found a way to fix this with the settings, but instead just paint the EXR maps to fix it. A quick fix.

 

Thanks for your guide. It helped a lot for me

 

Thanks, was some quite useful information. Been messing around with Beast quite a bit, but was unsure of what exactly to change to get that last quality out of it.

 

Thanks for this tut!
Could you show a image of the result of these settings?

 

Nice tips, many thanks!

 

Kudos!

 

now that the Beast is gone in Unity 5, what setting would you recommend?

Thanks!