Baked Lighting Question

[gasparo8]

Hi All,

Relatively new to gamedev and unity. I apologize if this is a silly question. But light baking has been challenging to figure out. I am trying to bake lights for the first time. I would like the scene’s lighting to look like this first photo. I have included the lighting scene settings for reference.

Below is an object in the scene’s settings for reference:

Below is the main point light in the room:

However, after baking, the scene turns into this:

I am using a MacBook Air and Unity version 2022.3.15f1. Why am I not able to achieve the lighting/coloring after baking the lights? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

-Thanks

[Pema-Malling]

The settings you are baking with are quite low. You’ll probably want to increase your direct and indirect sample counts (mostly the indirect one), as well as lightmap resolution and max lightmap size. Those blue and red artifacts on the wall are likely due to low sample count.

If you have a GPU, I suggest selecting the GPU lightmapper instead of CPU. It’s usually a lot faster.

The area around each light looks rather dim to me. Did you make sure to mark each light as Baked or Mixed mode, not Realtime?

Finally, I see you are using subtractive mode mixed lighting. Depending one what kind of platforms you are trying to support, you might want to evaluate if this is correct choice: Unity - Manual: Lighting Mode

Check out these 2 chapters in our troubleshooting guide for some more info:

Lightmapping Troubleshooting Guide

Chapter 11: Blurry lightmaps [8467121--1124861--BlurryLightmaps-Lightmap-LightmapRes8Vs32.jpg] Figure 22. Cornell Box scene baked at 8 texels per unit resolution (left). Same scene baked at 32 texels per unit resolution (right). Notice the increased shadow fidelity in the statue, and the lack of light leaking in the tall box. 11.1 Why does this happen? To ensure high fidelity output, Unity needs a high resolution lightmap to capture lighting information. Too few texels and the result will b…

Lightmapping Troubleshooting Guide

Chapter 13: Direct, indirect, and environment noise [8467157--1124897--LightmapNoise-All8sptVsAll2Kspt.jpg] Figure 28. All sample counts are set to 8 (left). All sample counts are set to 2048 (right). 13.1 Why does this happen? Progressive Lightmapper is a Monte Carlo path tracer. To achieve clean results, lightmapper needs to spawn many rays from each lightmap texel. Insufficient ray counts will lead to noisy lightmaps. 13.2 How to fix it? Note: to make the process of debugging easier,…

Additionally there are some resources here you might want to look at Global Illumination Learning Resources

[AcidArrow]

Also, if you really want it to look like the first photo, you should not really bake the lights (not sure what your target platform is).

I’m also not sure how close you want to get to the realtime results, but if you want no bounced light at all you could put indirect intensity to 0.