Official Progressive CPU Lightmapper

Mixed lighting is probably a better option in terms of visual fidelity, to say nothing of performance

 

If you want environment reflections as specular on your surface, you need to use an TGA or PSD texture file with specular on alpha channel.
Here is reflections on Container and ground surface using Reflection Probe:

 

I really don't understand the logic in that, probably because don't have any logic and I don't talk about external enviroment.

 

How do you bake this as a part of an automated build pipeline?

 

Do you ask me?

 

I am asking anybody who knows If you have the secrets then divluge them

 

Actually I'm adding sphere/planes to all lights, spheres with emissive, that don't bake the emissive and you cannot see in rendertime.

 

I was recently able to render a high resolution light map for my scene. The fidelity of the lighting overall was great, but the higher resolution introduced some odd artifacts in the light maps. Basically there were some full bright squares on areas of objects that should be dark (UV related perhaps?). Here's a small snip of what I'm talking about. Apologies for the low resolution and bloom, but I've since rebaked the scene, at which point the artifact doesn't show up.



Sorry if this isn't specific to the progressive baker, but I'd appreciate a nudge in the right direction to investigate the issue. Thanks!

 

Based on what you've described, it's almost certainly a UV issue. Unless you are using area lights which are known to produce artifacts with PLM(?)

 

Actually, I have the same issues without having any area ligths in scene. Area lights just make the problem worth. But this issues are pretty easy to correct. After the final bake I open up directional lightmap and fix all the empty squares on the textures. It's not that bad considering how good the overall light quality is in comparison to enlighten that took 40 hours to bake and insane resolution to get a results that remotely look like ones I get from 3-4 hours of baking with PLM.

 

Are there any known issues with the progressive lightmapping when making a standalone build?

I was doing some experimenting using the old Unity Labs demo. I'm aware it's no longer officially supported, but at least as of 5.6 it inports without any errors and the lighting builds quickly and beautifully in the editor so it's a good stand-in for any other complex 5.x environment. I let the progressive lightmapper completely finish before going to generate a build.

When it comes time to make a standalone build however it seems to get stuck, looking like it's starting an enlighten build from scratch? Is this expected behaviour?

 

out of curiosity, when you generate the standalone build, is 'autogenerate lighting' enabled, or not?

 

How can i change PLM settings in my script?

for example i need followings:

LightmapEditorSettings.PathTracerFilter.ATrous

and Indirect Sample coints

 

Thanks, I thought that might be the case. Is manually creating a light map UV set the best solution or is it possible that the auto UV settings in Unity are causing the problem?

Cheers, this fixes the problem, but is a bit tedious and would be great to avoid it if possible.

//Edit: I found a pretty decent workflow for removing the artifacts from the directional maps. It's not perfect, but it's faster than editing the directional maps by hand.

1) Open the _dir map in Photoshop
2) Duplicate the layer
3) Run the xNormal dilation filter (set pixel radius large enough to resolve gaps in the _dir map)
4) Control click the original layer to load it as a selection
5) Expand the selection with the same pixel amount used in the dilation filter
6) Use the selection to create a layer mask on the dilated layer
7) Hide the original layer and save the PNG

 

I obviously can't be sure exactly what issue you are facing, but many issues in lightmapping come from bad normals, bad geo, bad UVs, etc. If you let Unity generate lightmap UVs, you lose control over the placement of seams, but you probably won't face any issues with UVs either. There is a known issue regarding negatively scaled meshes (mirrored objects), but this can be addressed by setting backface tolerance to zero in the lightmap parameters. I personally have not encountered many issues related to PLM itself.

 

I have tested both Auto Lightmap UV Generation and manual unwrapping. The result is same. If you had lightmap uv problems, just increase Lightmap Scale in mesh renderer:

 

Any ETA on mixed mode lighting being supported by the Progressive Lightmapper?

 

I have a question though, when i baked my maps using progressive lightmapper, & when i reload my scene after restarting my comp, the lightmaps disappeared. Do i need to baked using enlighten after baking with progressive?

 

I found the difference between rendering with PLM and Offline CG Render:
PLM is an lightmap baker and lighting is calculated in lightmap texture size and resolution. So by increasing model's poly counts,the bake time will not change

CG Offline render is rendered in poly counts. When you want to use highpoly model, you should wait a long time to complete render. You cannot change easily lightmap resolution and reduce rendering time in this case.
Also resolution will be maximum in this case and will depend on triangle counts or pixel counts (i'm not sure)

The Solution:
1. Extract combined floor geometry from house model (Detaching in max, Extract in maya)
2. select floor mesh and increase lightmap scale to maximum
3.(optional) increase lightmap size
note: smaller parts(surfaces) has higher lightmap resolution, combined surfaces has lower lightmap resolution)

View attachment 231289

 

Hey, I'm using Unity5.6.1p1 and the progressive lightmapper is not working correctly.

I'm not sure what causes this issue. It never happened before.

 

Clean GI Cache and restart unity

 

Thanks for the suggestion, but that didn't work

 

Try a new scene
I already had this problem in my a big city scene. But after few minutes its solved during bake time as i remember.

 

Tiling Not Working With Transparency
With the progressive lightmapper, besides already listed problems with transpanrency, I've discovered that it's ignoring the tile settings of the shaders. The images are of a catwalk with transparency for the grating against a plane. The shader is just the standard shader. Here's with the tiling set to 1x1:


And here's with tiling set to 3x3 and then re-rendering:


Notice there is no difference.
Oh, and the bug with black areas behind transparent objects is still there, as described in page 2 of this thread. I found that setting "Bounces" to none in the Lightmapping Settings section gets rid of them, which is why they aren't seen here.

 

Thanks, that kinda solved the issue. I was testing the lightmap so it wasn't a big deal, but I'm getting worried that it might happen again on my main project.

 

Hey, I found out what causes the issue. When there is a terrain in my scene, Progressive Lightmapper doesn't work properly on Unity5.6.1. Is this a known issue?

 

Same for me. Fixed by adding a simple cube into scene

 

PLM is still unusable in outdoor scene
please fix this issue

 

I found the issue.
Unity always used Very-Low preset for terrain in lighting settings. You should create manually an Lightmap Parameters with 0 Backface Tolerance and set it manually to terrain in Lighting settings. Terrain does not uses scene lightmap parameters automatically.

Also to fix black areas on tree leafs, you can increase Pushoff in lightmap parameters

 

Can unity add a continue button to the PLM, so if my 4 hour bake was almost there i can add another hour to it instead of restarting a 5 hour bake. I know i could just start a massively long bake and stop it when it's ready but that would affect the prioritize view option being used to judge if the bake is good enough...i zoom in to look at a problem area at start of baking.

 

Fixed double sided geometry baking in 2017.1b9:

Added geometry transparent baking (window glasses that are made using cubes):

 

to get cleaner fake indirect shadows, you can use low intensity spot lights inside windows and indirect light sources:
similar to ue demos
Also noise reduced to minimum in this case. for example 500 sample counts is now comparable to 3000 sample counts

 

Fake indirect shadows with higher quality than correct way :
Cleaner bake with less noise

 

I probably found an issue with PLM,
in large scenes with lots of lights, it starts to ignore some of them completely. The worst part about this behavior is, that it seems to pick the ignored lights at random.
It happens when having more than a few (> 20) lights in a scene.


You can clearly see it in the screenshot above, that although all spotlights have the same settings (and are active) only few of them are having visible cones on the faces underneath them.

The scene is nothing all too strange. It's a warehouse (aprox 300 x 100 units) with one directional light as the sun, 7 (very large) area lights underneath the ceiling-window-areas to add some extra "indirect illumination" and then the ceiling lights (more than 50 of them), which consist of 2 spotlights each (to fake their non-spherical shape)

It is baking rather fast (compared to enlighten) - takes about 45 minutes with the following settings:

# direct samples: 32
# indirect samples: 250
lightmap resolution 15

it results in 8 1024 lightmaps for the whole scene, which seems reasonable for me...

I haven't tested it with 2017-beta, but i'd like to know, if there is some sort of limit in regards to number of active lights (which would kinda defeat the purpose of baking them beforehand...)

 

I'm quite confused at the status of dynamic objects casting shadows onto static objects in "Subtractive" mode using the PLM (5.6.1)

In the most simple of tests, this works fine until you change from Enlighten to PLM. Then it no longer works.

However, there are no notes inside Unity or on the Google documents?!

 

As a follow-up to my previous post above:

I opened the exact same scene in 2017.1 and the PLM now works correctly with regards to dynamic objects casting shadows onto static objects.

I can only assume this was a known bug in 5.6; I know bugs happen but it is a little frustrating to place a tooltip inside the lighting panel which says "Dynamic objects [...] cast shadows on static objects [...]" if it's not true. I can tolerate a bug, but not the in-application UI telling me complete falsehoods. I've spent hours trying to work out what I was doing wrong.

 

...or you could just read the info in 5.6, which states exactly this.
Sorry, i don't want to offend you, but it's written right there even with a warning icon:

 

No offense taken. I can see that tooltip quite clearly, but there are 4 light modes listed.

Baked Indirect
Shadowmask
Distance Shadowmask
Subtractive

The tooltip says that 'Shadowmask' and 'Distance Shadowmask are unsupported'.

Am I to infer from this tooltip that the final light mode, subtractive, which is not mentioned in the tooltip, is also unsupported?

 

somewhat, because it only is gone, when you pick "baked indirect" and the preliminary documentation (https://docs.google.com/document/d/...Eyfmojn_JlCeoLN9Q/edit#heading=h.cxiwma8xnxjv) states also "Currently light modes are not supported, please be sure to set ‘Baked Indirect’ and do not use ‘Stationary’ lights. The support will come soon."

As the whole feature (PLM) is clearly marked as Experimental and in further development, it's kinda to be expected, that certain things just won't work right now, no matter the tooltip.

My aforementioned bug with PLM ignoring lights when baking is confirmed as a bug by now as well, by the way.

Again, i'm sorry you spent hours on this, but it wouldn't have been necessary, i guess.
I do agree, that the tooltip is kinda badly written, but at least it's there to begin with.

 

Same problem for me with 257 spot lights. Already worked fine but when i adding new lights... disabled randomly (chooses from all lights)
Maybe those bulbs are burnt for more realistic behavior

 

I reported the issue via bug reporting and got informed, that it is recognized as bug and forwarded to the developers. Let's hope, that there will be a fix for this soon. The linked case is not visible to me, because it asks for a login, which i don't have...

 

Hey, guys. Is anyone getting issues with sudden overexposed lighting when they are in play mode AFTER baking? I'm using the bake prefab lightmap script amd unfortunately when I play my scene, I'm suddenly seeing my entire scene glow



And then


This happens with Enlighten and the PLM.

 

@KRGraphics Yes, we do here.
Only happens with 5.6 though, on 5.5 it was working fine.

 

So, to add to the Lightmapping woes... I filed a bug report for issues during play where my lightmaps would become overexposed and wash out everything.

Case 924520 is my report

 

The lightmaps disappear completely if you bake with the PL

 

I will give that a shot. Though just now I opened the scene to disable reflection probes, and I just played the scene and the problem went away... I don't know how exactly, but I will keep the scene to do further testing. I also did a new project and it wasn't doing it. It might be something in my project

 

@Jesper-Mortensen I think I found the culprit in my project. If you set Direction Mode to Directional, the entire scene becomes bright as a Roman Candle.

Non-Directional Mode During Play in Scene View



Directional Mode During Gameplay (This happens EVERY TIME!)