UPDATE: 8/8/15
This problem happened again and I think I have solved it. I first tried manually deleting every ounce of Gicache in my computer. When that didn’t work, I noticed that a doorknob model that I brought in from Sketchup never had its UVs made by Unity. It was around the same time that this problem reared its ugly head again. I had it generate UVs and rebaked and all of the problems went away, so far.
MAKE SURE THAT EVERY MODEL THAT YOU ARE USING HAS ITS UVS GENERATED BY UNITY IF THEY DIDN’T COME PREPARED. See if that helps. I will post here if it happens again in this model.
I have been having a few problems with lightmapping over the years. With the jump from Beast to Enlighten, I thought they would go away. Not only did the original issues not go away, more came. It's maddening and now I turn to you all for some help. I have searched the forums and have found clues and tips for some of these, but NOTHING has helped.
Background: I am taking models designed in Revit and putting them into 3DS Max using the Suite Workflow feature. I am then using the Autodesk Material Converter script to get the materials into Unity. This process works great and always has. I then generate lightmap UVs in Unity, which takes forever, but works. In the past, and currently, I use a many different settings from baked lighting only, Realtime and baked, all sorts of padding values, a range of quality values, default values...these problems still persist.
I have a wide range of lights. One directional and about 2 dozen spot. I have changed the pixel light count to 50 to ensure all of the lights are represented in the scene.
My issues.
**1-Splotchy dark spots on random geometry (black spots on vertical bronze trim)**
This is a particularly irritating issue as it happens at random. I can rebake and sometimes it will go away and it may, or may not, appear on another object. I often have to clear my entire lightmap and rebake and see if that does it. Upon clearing and rebaking this one WITH THE EXACT SAME SETTINGS, the problems were solved...until they came back again. The randomness is what concerns me. You can't see it in this shot, but there are three stools on the left. The one in the middle is completely covered in these spots, while the two identical ones near it are fine.
**2-Dark spots on seams of geometry**
These spots really bother me. At first I thought it was ambient occlusion, but even at 0, they still persist. Higher resolutions make them higher quality black spots. Different padding values does nothing. I have re-generated UV maps for these objects with a wild variety of settings. Nothing fixes it. If anything, it scoots the black spots around.
**Issues 1 and 2 occurring in the same scene, at the same time, in the same view in a different part of the model.**
Hooray.
**3-Strange banding when light passes through transparent material**
****
This is the only NEW issue. This wasn't a thing in Unity 4 that I ever ran into. I don't know why this is happening. The alpha channel is all the way down and the standard material is set to transparent.
**BEHOLD! MORE RANDOMNESS!!**
This really put me over the edge. I changed the resolution from 40 to 10 to test baking. This is the result after bake. I cleared the lightmapping and tried again. Same thing. I cleared the lightmapping completely, disabled all lights, and nothing changed. I have to restart Unity after erasing all of my lightmapping work in order to get it to display correctly, and then all of the problems in this thread start over.
My specific settings change all the time, which leads me to believe that they have nothing to do with these issues. I am on a Titan X, 3.5ghz intel CPU, 32 GB of RAM. Over the past few years, I have never been able to reliably eliminate any of these problems. They either show up or they don't.
Additionally, in Unity 5, I can select the shadow strength when I toggle a light to realtime, but the option goes away when I change it to baked. However, the value still applies in the editor and in baking. It seems that in order to change the shadow strength of a baked light, I need to change it to realtime, make the changes, and then go back. A bug or a feature?
For lightmapping issues, if anyone has any insight, I would love to hear it. If I have to bake in 3DS Max instead, I may end up doing that, however I fear that will lead to it's own set of issues.
