This is probably a noob question, but I am playing with lightmaps in unity and I am finding that with baked lights and the same lighting settings (intensity etc) the scene looks much darker.
This means that for me to test how it will actually look realtime is not a good indicator and baking everytime I change a color or increase light intensity would be an extremely time consuming process.
Is this normal? Is there a good workflow for this that someone can share?
I also have the issue of character which needs to have realtime lights. If I increase the light intensity to compensate for the above, the character appears very bright (as it’s using realtime).
Hope this makes sense and somebody can help me out!
Lighting & lightmap baking is a tricky thing & I don’t claim to be an expert… But I will add my 2 cents in and hope it helps.
Real-time(RT) lighting is an approximation. It cuts corners to be able to be calculated fast. Example a light ray bouncing off a surface, causing color bleeding, and how many surfaces it permitted to hit & reflect off off before it dies(Light Rays, or just rays). The more rays the more realistic, but also take time to compute. With RT this is skipped & most lights just have a radius that they affect. Or something similar along those lines. Easily controlled by their intensity and a few other options.
When you using light baking those rays bouncing around your scene are will either increase/decrease the lighting in your scene depending on their values. If you have a ton of then and you have their bounce values jacked up… Lighting in your scene will look too bright, too low & the rays die before they have time to illuminate your scene. With time and tweaking you can get awesome results. The problem is that first bake normally is pretty ugly.
To help, reduce the size of the map, reduce the ray count and bounces, etc. Anything that will speed up the baking process. Also, you could only have certain objects set as “Static” to speed up lightmap baking. Just to get a sense of where things are at. As you get closer to the results you want you can set more objects as “static” so they’re included in the lightmap baking. In the end the process isn’t to dissimilar to pre-rendering. Drop your quality setting & objects being evaluated to speed things up. They buildup from there.
For you character, light can be set to RT, baked, or mixed. You could set you lights to mixed. Objects that received baked lighting will ignore this light(s) while your character should still receive RT lighting. Another option is just settling your lights to baked for the scene. And using only a few RT lights in your scene for the character. I’m sure there are a bunch of different workflow options out there.