Progressive CPU Lightmapper

Dear beta users,

The latest Unity beta (5.6b6) includes an experimental version of the new Progressive Lightmapper. We are super excited to bring this feature to you and hope that it will considerably improve the workflow of those of you who work with baked lighting.

Preliminary docs:

We still have a few features incoming (see below) and some bugs to iron out. At the same time please note that the release in 5.6 will initially be marked as experimental.

Coming very soon:

  • Directional mode support.
  • Transparency support.
  • Terrain Tree baking support (they affect the surroundings, but are using light probes themselves).
  • Improved area light sampling.
  • Filtering improvements

Coming soon:

  • Support for Mixed lighting modes.

Coming later:

  • Support for baking big scenes without high memory usage.
  • Baked LOD support.
  • Importance sampling of emissive surfaces.
  • Light cookies support.

Known issues:

  • Probes positioned inside geometry can in some cases have non-finite values leading to bad probe lighting - please place probes outside geometry.
  • Undoing light probe editing can cause errors in the console, these should be benign.
  • Currently there is a maximum of 3000 lightmap static objects in the scene, more than that will fail.

Hope youā€™ll enjoy it and rest assured that weā€™re working full steam to get the remaining features and improvements to you as soon as possible.

Best regards,
Lighting Team

7 Likes

Iā€™m assuming that includes any light with baked soft shadows, right? (because those are kinda noisy too and they never resolve)

Very cool feature, long time awaited !

A bug on negative scaled objects has been submitted : Case 877021 (posted screenshot on another post, Progressive vs Enlighten)

One suggestion : Indirect Resolution should be greyed out when using pure static baking with Progressive, since it has (if iā€™m correct) no influence at all in the new Progressive Lightmapper !

Keep up the good work !
Thanks

Also, it seems like the preview for the progressive lightmapper is clamped. I mean some overbright areas in the lightmap seem clamped while itā€™s baking, but once itā€™s done it seems they appear properly.

Is it a bug, or is it done for performance reasons?

Hey @PolygonFormation
Currently, this is by design and in future, there will be a better way to handle backfaces (a two sided flag will be added) and for now, the workaround is to set the backface tolerance to zero in lightmap parameters (see the attached GIF below)

2944834--218042--BackfaceTolerance.gif

1 Like

In the next build large Area Lights will converge much quicker. You will also be able to specify how many samples to use for direct lighting (currently its locked to 32). This should allow any soft shadow to converge properly.

Thanks for submitting the bug. Yes we will grey it out if you also disable realtime GI.

What exactly does clamped mean? But no it pretty much does all the compositing while baking progressively. It does not do the lightmap compression though.

Clamped meansā€¦ clamped :slight_smile: High brightness values are clamped. return clamp(color, 0, 2);

Example:

I have a VERY bright point light next to a wall.

Here is how it looks while itā€™s baking:

2945004--218068--notdone.jpg

Here is how it looks after itā€™s finished:

2945004--218069--done.jpg

Do you have any reflection probes in that scene just wanted to make sure that its purely baked direct lighting thats clamped. What does the ā€˜Baked Lightmapā€™ scene view look like in those two cases?

I donā€™t have any reflection probes no.

And itā€™s not just baked direct, itā€™s any light, it could be indirect if you somehow manage to get it really bright.

Baked Lightmap view looks ā€œcorrectā€, since all the materials are white. It mostly happens when using dark materials.

To reproduce you need a really bright light source (more than ā€œ2ā€), and a dark material (darker than 128,128,128).

(I can make a repro, but itā€™ll have to wait until tomorrow)

Wowā€¦ this progressive lightmapper is freaking sweetā€¦ and in my Sanctuary level, the lighting looks evenā€¦

Exciting stuff, Iā€™m really looking forward to this. One issue so far: the light attenuation between dynamic and baked lights donā€™t seem to match in the progressive lightmapper, baked lights always seem to be a bit brighter than dynamic lights, even when using linear colour space. When using Enlighten backend they are almost a perfect match (but only in linear colour space). This could become a problem because there will be visual discrepancies between static and dynamic lights, and I can see some users struggling to maintain consistent lighting in their scenes if they use mixed lighting modes. Iā€™ve attached some screenshots for comparison:

It would be great if you could bring back the ā€œShow Lightmap Resolutionā€ toggle, for some reason it has disappeared in the 5.6 beta. It would be nice to turn off the checkerboard pattern so we can see the quality of our lightmap bakes.

3 Likes

I am truly liking that I can see my scene lighting in one spot before it is finishedā€¦ but sometimes when you build a level, not everything is built in one whole piece. Is there a way I can implement a blocker mesh to keep the light from spilling through? Example, that harsh light on the roof? In reality, that would never happen like thisā€¦

True, we havenā€™t matched the point/spot falloff yet. We will prioritise this.

ā€œShow Lightmap Resolutionā€ toggle will be back - this is a bug. In the whole UI refactor it somehow got lost.

1 Like

Iā€™ve just downloaded the Beta to try it for myself a little. Just with a probuilder test so far. But before I try to find the time to dig deeper into this I have to say:
So far the most useful thing about the progressive lightmapper has to be the ETA of the bake!
Itā€™s so great to actually see (and not only guess) how much a setting will influence the bake time. This makes prototyping so much easier and better, throughout. Canā€™t wait for this feature to progress into a stable work version. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

+1. And the fact that I can focus on ONE AREA where the camera is facing and bake thatā€¦ the one thing I do ask is if we can try to revert to the pre-Enlighten behaviour of baking lightmaps to prefabā€¦ thus is extremely important especially for prefab heavy assets like UFE

2 Likes

I must to tell that the new progressive lightmapper is impressive. I have used the system in old scenes that was impossible to obtain a good solution with enlighten and now i see perfect all the assets. Really good work.

So far the progressive lightmapper is nothing short of impressive.

There is still one issue I would like to see addressed that made Enlighted completely unusable for my projects - the lack of lightmap dilution/padding. There is no reason to have any non-padded pixels on a lightmap.

The progressive lightmapper seems to generate some padding, but it is not nearly enough to avoid black lines when looking at surfaces from far away.

I hope this issue will be addressed.

1 Like

I wish iā€™d found this forum earlier, spent ages trying to fix the negative scaling problem. So far i like the new lightbaker, gives you a much faster idea of what itā€™s going to look like.