Hey People,
We have been trying to light the scene and are getting weird patches. Can somebody guess what the problem is
Here is a screen shot.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b1v1onz36a2k8qp/ExtLightMapProblemScreenShot.jpg
You’re talking about the color patches on the bottom? Looks like bouncing…
Can you post your lighmapping settings?
Splotchiness is probably caused by having too small a resolution.
The image attachment isn’t available so I can’t see exactly what your experiencing.
Some general tips to try:
- Increasing the resolution
- Amount of bounces used - try 3 or 4
- Use a self-illumin material on the object where patches occur and set the emission to a low value - can hide the patches
- Up the max atlas size of the lightmap textures
Thanks,
Chris
Here are the settings
https://www.dropbox.com/s/25bmng2q2uhclir/Screen.png
There are different buildings in the scene some of them don’t appear to have a problem like the bottom one. but the top one has splotches.
Thanks,
Arvind
Yeah, your resolution is 5. That means you are only getting a 5x5 patch of texels on the lightmap per every 1x1 meter area in your game. That’s not very much, and likely why you are getting splotches, the lightmapper just doesn’t have enough texels to work with to give you nice lightmaps. Raise that up. Try 20 maybe. Note that it will drastically increase your burn times.
Alternately, you can raise your interpolation a bit to add some blur to the lightmaps. This will hide the splotchiness, at the cost of detail. That might be a better solution if you are lightmapping very large areas and you can’t raise your resolution.
BTW: Do you really want your Bounce Boost and Intensity that high? In my experience, this will make your lightmaps much brighter than the areas affected by your real time lights, which will have the effect of the area where the player is walking will dim down in comparison to areas further away. In my scene, I found setting both of them to 0.5 added just a slight bit of ambient light to the entire scene, but kept same basic light level between near and far constant (but then, I’m using duel lightmaps, perhaps that is not the case with single maps? If it works for your scene, then it’s all good).
I should say, I’m no lightmapping expert. Far from it! I’m just learning how to do it myself. But I’ve run into that same problem, and that is what helped me.
How do you change the atlas size, Chris? I need to do that (When I tried to do a full scene high quality bake, I ended up with too many maps, >255), but I don’t see where to set it.
I too would suggest what @RonHiler has suggested, also, a general tip I suggest is to bake your scene the first time with the default settings, that will give you a great started point in terms of tweaking each value and rebaking to improve your results.
@RonHiler You can edit the max size of the Lightmap texture in the lightmap texture import settings. Post-baking, just select the lightmap texture in the project tab and in the inspector you will now see a bunch of import settings, one of them is called: Max Size, by default it should be set to 1024x1024, but that can be increased to 2048x2048 and 4096x4096.
For more general info on max atlas sizes there’s a post on it here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/56435-light-map-max-at-1k-solved?
Thanks,
Chris
Thank you Ron and chris for the tips… Will try all your suggestions and will let you know.
Ah, okay, thanks Chris. So that’s just a method for increasing the quality of the lightmaps post-bake then. I was thinking in terms of raising their size pre-bake, so that less actual textures are generated (because, as I said, I’ve gone well over the 255 texture limit), so that doesn’t help me, unfortunately. I’m going to have to bite the bullet and lower my resolution.
Good luck Arvi. Do let us know how it goes. As I’m still learning this process myself, I’m quite interested in what results other people get.