i want to ask if what is the best lightmapping application? and easy to use. i hope someone will share that application. thank you.
Beast since its free for you to use, and automatic, and built into unity.
If you have Maya/Max you could use those and along with vrays and bake lightmaps in them. If i am not wrong. And yeah your best bet would be beast since i think it’s not bad too. 
At one point in time I thought Gile was a great lightmapper but never tried using it:
~~http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=giles.features~~
Not sure what state it is in now…
-Will
I don’t know why you would all make your own jobs harder when beast is built in. The quality you will get in vray and so forth is hugely dependent on your skill, physical properties of your level and so on. Beast is far easier to get acceptable results from.
thanks all for the info. i tried beast lightmapping and it was awesome.
biggest issue in beast - if i use a pre made lets say , pre made ‘bed’ which is made of many polygons, then beast will take endless time in generating uv’s and even after clicking generate colliders it takes a lot of time… And at this time i too dont find how much % is done or left…
am i right or wrong ?
you see how much % is done in bottom right corner.
As far as I know, Beast’s pretty much the bees knees other than the specialised Geomerics real-time radiosity stuff.
I’ve fallen for Beast… and I am using my Pro trial just to play around with it and test out new shaders and effects :)… so yes, while Beast takes a while, the quality alone is worth the wait 
Exactly- hello? lol
Use Beast, it works great, good quality, built in and integrated pretty well, renders large complex scenes very, very fast, and is super easy to use- nothing complicated about it at all.
Now if you’re question is “which is a good 3rd party alternative because I don’t have Unity Pro and I need GI and all the bells and whistles” then that’s different.
There are many renders you can lightmap with. You can use V-Ray, mental ray, Turtle, and many others out there. The pipeline is more advanced of course, but nothing a professional developer can’t knock out easily. Personnally, I would use mental ray because it’s accessible (included for free with Maya, Softimage, 3dsMax), high quality, renders really fast, and you have complete control over your GI algorithms, optimizations, etc. Plus since you are still working within your DCC package (assuming you’re using one of the three names above), it makes your pipe more streamlined, efficient, and faster. This is my opinion, but not all pipes are the same and some devs do things differently than others. Good luck with your search, but stick with Beast within Unity if you can.
how could you make a lightmap image using vray?
First thing you need, is to setup a high end light rig for your scene with VRay (actually you would do this in 3dsMax, Maya, Softimage- or whatever app you’re using VRay with).
Once you have VRay rendering some bad*** stuff, simply render out the lightmaps you need, you can render out things like albedo maps, occlusion maps, beauty passes, specular passes, reflection passes, etc. Rendering out a beauty pass is ok, but rendering out in passes gives you ultimate control, so you can use Photoshop for example, and comp your passes however you want, tweak, etc.
Bring your final light maps into Unity and apply to your materials, and you have yourself some amazing lighting within Unity that will impress everyone 
Beast is fine, but if you want really great results use Vray.
There is, however, another reason where Beast beats Vray and thats in production.
Unity is prefab based, it expects and prefers you to have chunks of re-usable geometry. Chunks that can be occlusion culled and so forth, and using vray means that your lighting is stuck on it for good. With beast each scene can reuse the same prefabs with different lighting, a huge time saver for a smaller developer.
The alternative would be setting up more code, more art paths and dynamic loading of lightmaps that you painstakingly lay out in an external package, indeed you wouldn’t be able to just tweak it on the fly either.
It’s for that reason I’m staying with beast rather than vray. Vray will be better results. But will it be results that the user appreciates? maybe not as it is still very much scene dependent.
there are 2 other reasons for Unity lightmaps and beast therefor:
- Dual lightmaps and with Unity 3.5 radiosity lightmaps
- I would assume the light probes will be baked by beast too and not ‘realtime lightmap fetched’
ive found out that c4d’s bake object is quite good. ill try vray but i dont know if c4d has plugin for it.
The main reason I don’t use Beast is because my levels are contained in asset bundles and Beast lightmapping info doesn’t get compiled into those. So when you load in a level from a bundle, poof, no more lightmaps.
I think I would say that Beast is superior if you’re making a game. VRay or mental ray would be better if you work in the arch /product viz fields and you work on visualizations that need to be interactive, but look photorealistic.