Baked Lightmap vs Realtime Lightmap explained?

Unity Engine
1

Hello

I realize there are two kinds of lightmap happening in the Mixed lighting at the same time.

Baked Lightmap associates with the Lightmap resolution.

while

Realtime Lightmap associates with the Indirect resolution.

This is kind of confusing to me, can anyone explain this to me? what’s the purpose of Realtime Lightmap.

Thanks

2

“realtime lightmap” is what Enlighten was intended to do.

Instead of producing just a texture map you apply to your scene for lighting, it stores the data in a way that if you move a light around, the indirect light updates with it.

This has nothing to do with Mixed Lighting.

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3

Hi

When you do mixed lights, you don’t do anything with “Realtime GI”, it’s just realtime. This means that shadows or direct light (depending on what mode you select) are in realtime, and indirect is done using baked lightmaps.

The indirect resolution is used both for realtime GI and baked GI (when you use the Enlighten backend). Indirect resolution decides how big the clusters should be (go to Scene mode → Clustering top-left in the Scene view). The clusters are then used directly by the Realtime GI system, or in the baking process when using Enlighten Baked GI.

Have a look at my talk on youtube, “Bake it til you make it”. It goes over the basics of baking and also explains these concepts :slight_smile: Let me know if you have any more questions!

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