Apparently OTOY is integrating Octane into Unity. That means lightmapping with the Octane engine. This scene is rendering in seconds.
IT IS GLORIOUS
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Octane is not speeding up Unity. This completely replaces Unity’s lightmapper under the hood.
No release date has been announced. But imo it sounds like it might be available soon.
It is glorious! And this isn’t a future release, it’s using the current public release that went out to everyone last week. We just need to share the sample project shown here and create more tutorials.
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Guess that explains why enlighten hasn’t received much love in the past. Happy to see that light baking is finally done on the GPU. Looks cool!
I didn’t dare to hope they’d go this far with Octane integration, but I’m very happy they did. Good job Unity!
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And good job Otoy! 
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This is the best news ever.
It’s a huge win. From this foundation, so much more can now be built on top (e.g. mega-texturing, light field baking). Also Octane 3.08 is dropping very soon with OSL shaders which is also a game changer inside Unity 
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Hello from a hobbyist perspective, can you guys explain what is exactly is Octane? In addition, what is the benefit for the developer of having the octane engine as opposed to what is there now? Only asking as I am not too familiar with lightmapping. Thanks in advance.
Is this for baking maps? or also for realtime GI?
i want my days wasted baking lightmaps back
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Wait what am I seeing?
As a person that has been lightbaking scenes for years is the holy grail of GI baking finally at our doorstep.
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They’ve made some sample scenes available and the website suggests it’s going to be out this year.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=relevance/query=publisher:30723
Early pricing information is available on their roadmap.
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@Ryiah OTOY came into the thread after I posted
The functionality is already available, just waiting on a how to from OTOY
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I watched his talk at Unite and interview from a few days ago (see Unity’s youtube channel) and it’s exciting stuff.
I tried their renderer inside Unity and it worked fine, but it’s the lightmapper I’m interested in.
Lightmapping is where you calculate the lighting and turn it into a texture, so your CPU/GPU doesn’t have to do any work in-game. They are integrating one of their products OctaneRenderer into Unity, so we can use that to generate the lightmaps, instead of Enlighten/Progressive. Their CEO said recently that it’s been about 10x faster or more than Unity’s Progressive lightmapper, because it’s using the GPU.
It can also act as a general renderer, so you can render out cinema-quality images/movies with it.
It’s not for real-time gameplay. I think that will come with Brigade.
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So this already looks neat as it is.
Is this editor only? With bakes that fast I’d love to put them at load time instead of having hundreds of extra megs of data for my players to download.
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- Powered by up to 20 GPUs
Challenge Accepted.
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Not just that, but it could also be used for procedural/user content?
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In case anyone missed it, here is the OctaneRender interview from Unite Austin 2017.
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Does this support global illumination, though?
So how come on the otoy forum there is a thread asking about lightmap baking release date, and someone from otoy replied saying that they are working with Unity to get some edge cases resolved, and will inform us when there is more concrete information?