Color bleeding and lightmaps

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,
I’m playing a bit with Beast lightmappin, what an awesome tool!

I’m having some problems about two main things…

  1. I remember from the demo that Beast allows color bleeding too, I did some tests with a grey plane and some standard objects ( cubes, spheres, cylinder ) with all different colors, but other than the lightmap itself I can’t see the color bleeding together…am I missing something?

  2. I don’t know if I’m seeing something curious, but this is the thing: I exported my scene ( a monument with 40 objects in total ) in .FBX, then imported everything into Unity3D…ok, I assigned the “Generate UV maps” for the lightmaps and I started shading everything…after that I setup the final gathering and bounces, then I hit bake…at the end I had my scene lightmapped…but what I can see in the Lightmapping window is a unique, quite large ( 1024x1024 ) lightmap that contains all the object in the scene…is that normal? shouldn’t be a lightmap for every single object, like you get from a 3D app like Softimage or 3ds?
    I tought that, because of the .FBX, Unity3D assume that is a big single object ( even if there are 10 different pieces together that shapes the monument ), so I tried to export each object in the scene separately, but then again, when I hit bake I still have one large lightmap…
    Is that normal or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

Anyone? :frowning:

3

Color bleeding does only work in the Pro version as this requires GI. Furthermore it is a very subtle effect, you can use the Bounce Intensity option to make it more visible.

Generally Beast tries to fit as many objects as possible in a single lightmap to save texture memory and reduce draw calls. So yes, this behaviour is normal.

4

  1. I do have Unity3D Pro, so I suppose that if I enable the sky light intensity and the bounces I will have this effect, good to know :slight_smile:

  2. So, there is no possibility to bake a lightmap for every single object, like in a normal 3d app, but Beast manage lightmaps in this way, is that right?
    I’m worried about the fact that my scene will be huge, so I suppose that I’ll have like 3-4 large lightmaps…it is good for performance or it will be better to have single lightmaps for each mesh?

Thanks for the answer :slight_smile:

5
  1. Actually there is. If you assign objects to a specific lightmap you have to use “Lock Atlas” so Beast knows there is nothing to change there. However going this route will waste texture space and very likely generate additional draw calls. So few big lightmaps should perform better.
6

i had the same problem with a simple cornell box scene.

i did not manage to get any colour bleeding with a object with selfillu/diffuse material.

as i made a pointlight instead of the object i got really good colour bleeding.

can anyone confirm this? no chance for coulur bleeding with objects as lightsources?

thomes