Let me start by saying I’m a complete noob to Beast lightmapping. I’ve searched the forums for the last couple of days on this and while I’ve had minor successes, I still have one big hangup and thats that my trees are too dark after lightmapping.
My scene elements are a terrain (with several trees (including Big Tree standard asset and several from Nature Pack), one building, and one directional light with soft shadows. I turn the ambient light to black before I lightmap. Following lightmapping, the trees turn completely black (it does this regardless of any ambient light color). Turning the ambient light up to white helps this issue but the trees are still TOO DARK (imho). It doesn’t matter what settings I change in the lightmap dialog (i’ve tried increasing the skylight), I’ve tried both deferred and forward rendering, and i’ve tried increasing the intensity of the directional light - nothing seems to work. I’ve read that it could have to do with the Soft Occlusion Shaders but I do not know enough about shaders to begin to tweak those settings. I’ve tried to post pictures of before and after. Note: I realize my shadows overall are dark - I’m not concerned about this. I can tweak these settings. Why are the trees so dark now? You can see the billboard trees in teh distance are very bright.
This is definitely a bug. I have had the same exact issue since forever. I tried everything as well but seems Unity likes to charcoal trees placed by the terrain tool. I tried all the “hacks” in these threads but it just seems ridiculous to have to go through these tedious steps to try to save the 1,000 plus trees you spent hours on placing them.
The above proposed hack here is useless because after closing/opening Unity, the lightmaps are saved but the BIG problem, none of the lightmaps are assigned to objects in the scene. I have to manually assign all 100 plus lightmaps! Oh and not to mention that I have to manually enter all the offsets and tiling.
The above proposed hack doesn’t work either as I have used a number of trees contained in the pack supplied by Unity.(all have .psd textures).
I can’t believe that this has not been fixed and that everyone using Unity is not experiencing the same problem. Is it just common acceptance that you cannot use lightmapping and terrain trees/detail objects together in a scene in Unity? Any new insight to this would be great.
I believe the issue for me was ambient lighting. So before ligntmapping, I turn ambient lighting to black and when the lightmapping is complete, the trees are now dark. However, if you turn ambient lighting back up (to gray or whatever you are using) then this lightens the trees. Its been a while since I looked at it but I think that solved the issue for me.
Try to render the lightmap for the terrain separately (use “Bake Selected” in the LM window).
And turn off all lights, that do not affect the terrain (eg. lights inside a house). That worked for me.
I create all of my trees inside a game object. Before lightmapping a make a prefab. After lightmapping I erase the trees in the scene and replace them with the prefab. I light them with a directional light without shadows. The shadows are baked into the terrain lightmap. I’m using manually placed trees on a mesh.
