Jagged Shadows in Baked Lightmaps (Unity 5)

EDIT: Can everyone please upvote this bug so we can get a fix faster? Login and vote here:
http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/iss...alias-when-blur-radius-value-is-larger-than-1

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Hey all,
So I'm having an issue with very jagged shadows in baked lightmaps in Unity 5, and after searching a ton and trying every possible setting adjustment (that I know of!), I've decided to post the question here and see if anyone has a solution.

What I'm seeing is very jagged edges in certain places in my shadows:
(Scale: this is a large cliff wall, player being about a 10th of the height.)

Upping the Baked Resolution only makes the jaggedness smaller, but it's still very harsh. In Unity 4, I remember an option for sampling (or something similar) which smoothed shadow edges without upping the resolution, and it looked great. I've tried messing with all different types of samples, direct light quality, etc, but the only thing that seems to really change anything at all is Blur Radius (which actually helps quite a bit, but I'd rather not blur all my shadows if I don't have to). Also tried the "Default-HighResolution" general GI parameter, but again it changed nothing about the jaggedness.

The burn time for my scene is already between 5-7 hours per bake, which is crazy high if you ask me, and that's at a fairly low resolution (10 texels per unit). So increasing the resolution is probably not an option at this point (not to mention it doesn't soften the jaginess when doing test burns on this single object, just makes the jags smaller as I mentioned before).

Is there something I'm missing? I've run out of things to try...
Any help would be very much appreciated!

Here are all my settings.

Scene Lighting:


Lightmap Parameters:


Object Settings:


Light Settings (using one single directional light):


Project Quality Settings:


Thanks very much in advance!

 

Bumpity bump bump.

 

I'd say it's the way your UVs are laid out
maybe try to make an unwrap with fewer pieces...

 

At first I thought that might be it as well, but as you can see above, the UVs are in one piece except for one small triangle.
My guess is that this is more of an anti-aliasing/refinement/quality issue of some sort which I'm either missing or is broken... Any other ideas?

 

There is also this thing http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/large-scale-lighting-noise.313866/
I know it's not exactly your issue, but still interesting bug
Have you tried to scale object down?

 

Could you try shifting the auto UVs to a small number? Like 5? That may help, if I understand the visual style your're going for..

 

So I don't think the scale is the issue since the object isn't very large. I've included a default Unity 3d Cube object in the shot for scale.

I've assigned a higher pushoff value (from .0001 to .5) and it seems to soften the edge a tiny bit, but it's still definitely there:

And here's a before shot (.0001) if you'd like to flip back and forth to see the diff:


I'll file an issue and post the number in this thread for you.

 

Bug submitted - Case 689996

 

Just for fun I burned a comparison shot with Unity 4's lighting system, and it looks amazingly good!


And this is Unity 5 at the same resolution:


Again, I feel like there's some fundamental setting that isn't being considered as far as sampling is concerned, or something like that.

 

im having the same problem. its not an UV or scale issue.
each day working with unity 5 I miss unity 4's lightmapping more and more lol.

 

So after doing more tests, it looks like what I was afraid of. The GI anti-aliasing seems to have no effect on the aliasing of the lightmap whatsoever.


If that's the case, then this is pretty bad... Is someone looking into this on the dev side?

 

same story

with directional/specular it looks super bad

 

Can we get a fix for this asap? We can't get any sort of quality light burns until this is working.

 

Anyone...?

 

Same issue here:


Unity 5 light mapping is slower and gives worst results than Unity's 4 Beast. I really miss the old system

 

Edit: Just as I wrote this, I noticed that hiding my large ocean plane seems to reduce the distance between the jaggies, making them much less apparent. I'll try increasing the polygon count on my ocean and see if that helps.

I'm having the same problem, but with realtime shadows. It seems to be related to self-shadowing. As you can see in the first screenshot, it's not related to shadow resolution in my case, as the other shadows look great.

Bias is set to 0.1 and normal bias 0.4 on the sun directional light using soft shadows, and changing these values only moves the problem rather than hide it. Lowering shadow distance or camera clipping does not seem to make a difference.

This is my biggest issue with realtime shadows at the moment.

 

I am experiencing a similar problem with shadows when using a large plane for an ocean. This has little to do with lightmapping or geometry.
It seems the effective precision in bit depth of the shadowmap decreases when a large plane is either casting or receiving shadow. Perhaps there is a mistake in the frustum computation that results in a very low near clipping plane or a very large far clipping value?

EDIT: An example of the precision issue, clearly showing it is not a bias issue.
Scene was constructed from an empty scene, with a plane (scale 20.000) at the origin and a box (scale [10, 4, 1]) at position [0, 3, 0].


EDIT 2: Opened a separate thread here, since this seems slightly off topic.

 

Has any one found a fix for this?

 

Rumor on the street is Unity is aware of it and are working on a fix which is coming down the beta pipeline in an update, but not sure when the official fix will be released.. if anyone can chime in with more information it would be much appreciated.

I'm pretty disappointed at how broken Unity 5 continues to be now months after its release.

 

Yah, I'm not switching until 5.3 at least. Did the same with U3 to U4, seemed to work out pretty well.

 

I'm experiencing the same issue. Unity 5.1.2p2. Google brought me here.

Notice the jaggies on the chair leg. There is no reason, they are mapped well and take up a large portion of the UV layout. Anti-aliaising samples does nothing.

 

Can you show me your Uvs?

 

I don't think it has anything to do with the UV's.

to do with the UV's.

 

Try to use some decent seams before uv unwraping.

EDIT: to don't look to critic.

 

Very constructive. Thanks. FYI the chair renders and bakes fine in UE4.

I get zero errors from the UV mapping. Especially when baking in other applications!! The fact that Unity will totally alter UV1 or UV2 during light mapping is part of the problem.



The UV's check fine in Marmoset. Thanks.

Notice how Unity likes to ignore Preserve UV's even for UV2 during the lightmap process. It's a bug. It will do the same thing to UV1 or UV2. Unity will scale, shift, even cut the geometry.

 

It can be better but is not terrible.. is quite good.. try elements vertical or horizontal never in diagonal because you can get jagged lines. Maybe this is not the case but it could be...

 

More evidence that this has nothing to do with the UV mapping.

AA is not being applied during the lightmapping process, regardless of the Anti-alising Samples. Even if the chair legs take up a large portion of the lightmap.

 

Thanks. Surely AA should be applied here during the baking process, hence the bug? There is a setting for this but it seems to be ignored. We shouldn't have to baby sit every single process.

UE4 handles this asset perfectly fine during baking.

 

I have the same problem.. as you can see in my post
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wrong-uvs.347863/#post-2251603

 

You totally ignored my post. "preserve UV" doesn't work. Unity will alter the UV's however it sees fit to pack. Rotate, move, scale etc.

The chair maps totally fine. No smoothing issues, no normal issues (as visible in Marmoset). It tiles just fine. It is also split into parts.

Anti-aliasing clearly isn't being applied during the baking process. It's a bug.

 

You get same result with realtime GI?

 

I am with you i think is a bug... what videocard do you have? Maybe some setting in your driver... just gessing... like you i am getting very frustated i see a lot of potential in enlighten but is full of bugs.. i also have the uvs incongruency problem and i will add. a lot of artifacts,light leaking,bad atlasing,slow render times and not smart enough to render just individual pieces.

 

I doubt is a video card problem.

 

To the OP: I don't see a screen shot of your model import settings. Do you have the Generate LightMap UVs option checked on the model? I was getting some very bad lightmap results until I enabled that setting.

 

Hello everyone;

Actually for me the problem is still there even after unity 5.2.
I have downloaded many 3d model from turbosquad from multiple modelers and the same problem keeps happening.


please help me solve this, I never faced this in Unity 4!

 

Hey all, first off, thanks for looking into the issue and for your responses. With that said, it has been suggested multiple times that the UV layout/unwrapping is the issue. While the UVs certainly have an influence over what the light bake looks like, it is still not solving the problem. In Unity 4.x, the UV layouts were identical, yet there was no jagginess at all. We have already identified multiple times within this thread that the issue is not with the UVs, but with the antialiasing which still after all this time seems to be completely and utterly broken, and has zero effect on the lightmaps whatsoever. Before assuming that a UV layout adjustment is the answer, please look into why the antialiasing is still broken. Adjusting the UVs will only go so far and is just a band-aid for a much larger problem.

 

I've been following this thread for a few months now. This bug is probably the most painful of all the lighting bugs and is destroying the soft look of our game, "Lucky's Tale". Those jagged pixels are apparent everywhere. And none of these problems existed in Beast.


Here's a ground plane. Direct shadows are not being anti-aliased like other parts of the map. The texture has a black background instead of having padding or edge bleeding. These 2 things are contributing to the jagged, muddy lighting. The GI seems are painful too. Anti- Aliasing samples neither works on baked GI nor AO parameters. Why does "edge stitching" only work in realtime GI?

Your solution worries me a bit. You have final gather set to 2048!!! Of course that is a great work around but that's not realistic for a whole level because of the time it would take to bake a level at those settings. Also If I try to push Final Gather beyond 512 my computer with literally run out of memory or even blue screen. What are your system specs?

I've been working on lighting in Unity 5 for 2 months straight trying to get a result similar to the results we had in 4.6. I've have been trying every patch and beta release waiting for the lighting bugs to be fixed. I'm very frustrated along with the others on this GI forum.

-Nick Pappas
Tech Artist at Playful

 

A baking engine is supposed to supersample the edges of high contrast lighting to get rid of aliasing. The main problem is not the UV's. The main problem is that the baking engine is not supersampling high contrast edges in the light map.

Is this an issue of enlighten, or an issue of unity's implementation? Someone somewhere needs to be working on this because this is inexcusable for a modern baking engine.

It's a little disenchanting to see someone with an 'Unity Technologies' tag come in and act completely ignorant to this then claim it is primarily because of the UV's and not because the baking engine is currently not functioning to a level equivalent with every other modern light baking solution on the market.

I'm having this same issue as well. Can't really believe Unity 5 shipped like this and is at 5.2.2 and still not fixed.

 

Anyone know if mixed mode works? We're doing VR and need to bake as much as we can.

 

Last I checked, not really (it still has a ton of issues).

Your best bet is baked mode and lightprobes for "lighting".

 

That totally sucks :/

Can I ask why mixed mode is an option in Unity if it doesn't (and hasn't for a year) worked?
Not a tiny bit embarrassing?

 

As with many things related to lightmapping (final gather, gamma space, light probes etc), the features at first felt placeholdery at worst or a foundation to build upon at best. I mean they kinda did something, but it's not what they should or what you would want them to.

Which was kinda fine for .0 release.

But then new releases came out and they remained the same. And that was kind of bizarre.

(well, in fairness, lightprobes are fixed in 5.3, and in general the Deferred/Linear/Realtime GI workflow is pretty decent now. Everything else besides that is still kinda broken)