Lightmap Problem: near lightmap much too dark

Questions & Answers
1

I am trying to enhance my scene, which is using realtime shadows (range about 50m) and is a dark nighttime scene, with additional beast lightmapped shadows for far shadowing. But everytime I bake the scene I get a near lightmap that is much too dark.

When I set the ambient light brighter, the contrast is lost and the far lightmap is now much too bright.

Why the big difference between the lightmaps? Should I switch the lights to baked only for the render? Is it a setting I didn’t tune correctly? Is it a beast bug?

EDIT: Tried again, still no luck. I even tried to replace the near lightmaps with the far ones, but that did not change what the lightmapping is showing… is there a refresh funtionality somewhere?

Something odd though: when I try to select the Terrain in the first tab, it is not shown under “Terrain”… why? This seems odd, it is a Unity Terrain and it is static.

2

This isn’t a Unity answer, but if you have Photoshop (Mine’s cs2) and double click on the .exr
file in Unity, you can ‘increase exposure’ (lighten) in Photoshop, then save. No idea
how to fix in unity, been looking for years.

3

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/LightmappingInDepth.html#DualLightmaps

Specifically this part:

Dual lightmaps use two sets of lightmaps:
Far: contains full illumination.
Near: contains indirect illumination from lights marked as
Auto, full illumination from lights marked as Baked Only, emissive materials and sky lights.

So your lights are probably set to “auto”, set them to “Baked Only” and your near lightmaps should work properly.