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 youāll enjoy it and rest assured that weāre working full steam to get the remaining features and improvements to you as soon as possible.
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 iām correct) no influence at all in the new Progressive Lightmapper !
Also, it seems like the preview for the progressive lightmapper is clamped. I mean some overbright areas in the lightmap seem clamped while itās baking, but once itās 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)
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.
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.
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 āBaked Lightmapā scene view look like in those two cases?
Exciting stuff, Iām really looking forward to this. One issue so far: the light attenuation between dynamic and baked lights donāt 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. Iāve attached some screenshots for comparison:
It would be great if you could bring back the āShow 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.
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¦
Iāve 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!
Itās 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. Canāt wait for this feature to progress into a stable work version.
+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
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 wish iād 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 itās going to look like.