I was curious if anyone has some insight into the advantages/disadvantages of lightbaking in Maya versus lightbaking in Unity 3’s “shiny” improved baking functionality.
Coming from my own personal experience here would be pros and cons, but I’d love to hear from people who have had actual experience with both.
Maya Lightbaking:
Pros:
More control over light settings and placement.
Better quality/realism thanks to mentalray.
Cons:
It’s an inherently tedious process setting up your bake parameters and is time consuming as it is frustrating. Plus due to mental ray, render times can slow you down as well.
Unity Lightbaking: (Based off of what little I know of it)
Pros:
Much easier to setup, realtime results, drastically reduced implementation time since the maps are already in engine.
Cons:
Less control, lower quality resolution, no mental ray.
Thanks in advance for any insight.
Nevermind just tried Unity baking out. Holy crud, so much easier to use! 
Just had to chip in on this:
If you’re familiar with Maya or mental ray in general, I don’t really see how you think Unity’s implementation is better. I’ll break this down to a q&a.
Is it overall a tiny bit simpler ? Perhaps.
Does it produce better results ? Not a chance.
Is it as flexible as mray’s RTT ? nope.
Is the GI implementation as good? Nope.
Can you tweak the Unwrapped UV layout as easily? Nope.
Is it real-time? Nope, it still calculates and renders your lightmaps and depending on the number of objects in your scene it can take quite a while.
Is it difficult to configure mray’s RTT and Indirect Illumination settings (about 10-12 settings total)? Not really, it shouldn’t take more than a day (I’m exaggerating of course) and the results you get will simply be reproduced ad nausea in your entire project.
I see Unity’s lightmapper (just like UDK’s Lightmass) as an absolutely invaluable tool if you’re either prototyping a project or if you’re a programmer (or have very little experience with 3d apps). Otherwise, mray will win hands down on almost all accounts.
I guess it all comes down to how well you know or want to know the tools of your trade.
I think the new lightmapping is great. It’s true that a good 3D app can produce better results but its a hell of a lot more time and effort. You can probably get within 80% in unity with minimal effort and a fraction of the time. In my opinion this makes Beast in Unity better, not to mention that you can bring in new objects into the scene without having to redo all the baking and re exporting in Maya/Max.
The speed and convenience to produce good enough results for most people that have time and budget constraints makes Beast a winner.
Good planning and extensive testing (done prior to lightmapping) will save you the trouble of the re-baking/ exporting pass. Again, I still think it’s a matter of how well you know your tools and how organized your team is.
I completely agree.