Like others, I’ve been experiencing some problems with the new Enlighten lightmapping system so I decided to do a like-for-like comparison with Beast.
The results show that (in my test scene at least) the new Enlighten system is five times slower than Beast and results in a lower quality lightmap.
As you can see in the images below, the Enlighten lightmap has blotchy, multi-coloured artefacts (most noticeable in the second and third image). It also seems to show some strange square, grid like artefacts (third image, shadowed side of the cube).
The scene is about 280m by 380m in size. All meshes (including terrain) are built externally and imported as fbx. I used beta 5 for the Beast bake and beta 17 for the Enlighten bake (Beast is no longer available in beta 17). It’s also worth noting that the Enlighten bake is set to VeryLowResolution because HighResolution bakes crash Unity for me (bug 658437).
So my questions are…
Are the things I’m seeing bugs or expected behaviour?
Can we expect parity with Beast, in terms of both speed and quality, in the final version?
If not, will Beast still be available as an option?
Color artifacts looks like from DXT-compression and can be removed in one click i guess - in lightmapping settings (in “Baked GI” section) disable checkbox “Compressed”.
I’m set to iOS platform so it’s actually PVRTC compression, and both sets of lightmaps are compressed in the same way, so it’s not that (or at least not just that).
I think if you have Realtime GI enabled for the bake then Enlighten is not just calculating the static light maps as per Beast but also calculating the lighting ‘constants’ that can be used for Realtime GI. Disabling Realtime GI will make your bake go faster.
at the moment its for no special platform… standalone windows…
the lightmaps are 2048 with a baked resolution of 60. defaul high resolution. all lightmaps true color.
Can you post your enlighten settings? I am an avid user of Beast and I can tell you right now that your baked resolution is probably too low and your altas size is too low for all of that terrain.
Turn up your baked resolution. 60 is too low. Also, you need some more indirect bounces. Once Unity 5 officially releases, I will plan on doing a tutorial on enlighten
I also find the baked light maps below standard. People talk about settings but the default settings should at least look better then realtime lights and shadows.
This is what my terrain looks like. Horrible banding (bug filed):
The Unity 5 lightmaps look really really bad with compression on for me, worse than I remeber U4 lightmaps with compression looked like. But disabling the compression made them look pretty nice. I use them in this little, simple scene: http://www.animechtechnologies.com/kinnarpsdemo/
Very clean lightmaps imo.
There is no “correct” baked resolution for lightmaps. If the environment you’re baking is the size of a shoebox then 60 might be too low, but if the environment is the size of a city then 60 is insanely high (you’ll end up with a bazillion lightmaps).
Also, disabling compression is not really a solution. I’ve been using compressed lightmaps for years with no problem. The Beast lightmaps in the original post are compressed and they look fine.
But all that is beside the point. The images in the original post are a like-for-like comparison, so if I change those settings just for Enlighten it would not be a fair test.
Currently, like-for-like, Enlighten takes much longer to bake and the results look worse than Beast (I’ve not tried beta 18 yet but I’ll be doing that next week at some point).
I usually use compression once I get a look I like… in my case, the game will be moving so fast no one is going to notice. I am also testing Enlighten using a Cornell Box to get the maximum look from the lighting with compression OFF and it looks fantastic. When in Production, I keep the GI to realtime to get the look I am aim for… and then I bake down when I like what I see.
I am looking at my shot, and yes I see the compression artefacts, but that is a tradeoff you will have to deal with if you have a lot of objects. At most, you will be waiting for about 30 minutes for a decent sized level to build clean lightmaps without compression, but the size of the lightmaps will balloon out of control…
Here are some comparison shots:
Uncompressed (notice the size). I am not worried about the file size since I am just testing out the lightmaps. Also in this shot, there are no lights present.
Compressed:
Same number of lightmaps, smaller file size. (YAY!) I would rather have a bunch of lightmaps compressed and not take up build times than lightmaps that are super sized and increase the size of my build.
Unity is looking for case studies where you can demonstrate it, via bug report so if you can make a repro clearly demonstrating it, they should have more to work with.
I’ve submitted three bugs related to lightmapping that have all included those comparison scenes (658437, 657569 and 657558) but none of them specifically mention the speed and quality problem so I’ll submit one for that too in the next couple of days.
