Just a thought on how the lightmap rendering could be sped up, and Unity or the provider could earn a bit more money.
Another option could be a Unity user shared lightmapping system where users can earn asset store credits if they allow lightmapping processes to run on their space cpus?
A simple option to run the lightmap rendering on the cloud and allow the Unity user to continue working.
OK it could also be used for other heavy processing tasks in Unity but you get the idea.
Why wouldn’t you just use a real time system as in a WYSIWYG GI lighting system?
If you just looked 3 pages back XD http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/222436-Cloud-computing-with-Unity-In-distant-future-Maybe
Yeh, I think Real-Time GI is getting more mature by the day. One system is already in Asset Store looking real good and another is coming soon and both of them allows the result to be “baked” to lightmaps.
Also why Cloud? I know there are benefits, but uploading and downloading the massive scene files takes time (the reason why you would need “cloud based” solution because the requirement is too intensive for your own system) and the subsequent downloading of generated lightmaps will equally be huge and will take some time.
Why not just ask Unity to support GPU based Beast Lightmap rendering?
I know the guys at CryTek had a lot of issues with it in the beginning but towards CE3 they got it figured out:
http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC4/Static+vs.+Dynamic+Lighting
GPU based Beast sounds cool, but genuine question here. Would you have to re-beast it every time you changed something like a TOD system?
Actually, the beast I’m aware of… Isn’t there a realtime viewport for it? Where exactly is that in Unity?
Beast is just offline lightmap renderer built into Unity. And you don’t want to bake every conceivable solutions for something like TOD because that would just be way too memory intensive. Although it is not unachievable (see video below).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVv0bRL7rbE
Once the lightmap solution is baked, scene and game views will get updated.
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/Lightmapping.html
@ShadowK,
I believe Unity guys are capable (and can provide) such rendering system but due to the fact that it currently doesn’t properly works on mobile (for performance reasons) they just don’t prioritize it. Unity hardly provide features specific to one platform and when it happens it’s probably for a marketing stand point (example: Directx11 support as having just DX9 support will make Unity appears quite outdated).
I’m also for a unified rendering system a la CryEngine where everything works together and everything is real-time (all the time). But such rendering system won’t see the daylight on Unity (at least not till mobile hardware is capable off running such real-time rendering with acceptable performances).
Sorry I must not of described what I’m talking about correctly:
Beast is an autodesk lighting solution in which you don’t have to use it offline, it ships with eRnST:
http://gameware.autodesk.com/beast/features
There is usually a viewport for real time operations, I’ve never seen it in Unity and isn’t in the documentation.
That’s a good explanation, cheers.
From everything I have just read in looking over that page, it explicitly states that Beast is used for pre-calculated light maps. The only regards to realtime I see is in reference to the use of light probes; which Unity does support.
Bear in mind that all the lovely shiny Beast features we don’t have - DistriBeast, eRnsT, and so on - are part of the full version of Beast, which, AFAIK, has a five-figure price tag. Unity’s negotiated a deal with Autodesk to provide it to us for much less than that - $1500, or free if you don’t need GI - but I expect that part of the deal was that with a reduced price comes a reduced feature set…
It should be possible to license Beast directly from Autodesk and replace the version Unity is using with it, at which point you can get the full feature set. It might require a bit of help from Unity to get the integration going smoothly but if you’re the kind of user who can spend five figures on Beast then you’re probably the kind of user who can get Unity’s attention…