Testing lighting in in the latest Unity 5.3.0 beta 5. I noticed horrible banding in the baked results. Its not very noticeable in the brighter scenes but in darks its awful. Its baked like this at even very high resolutions and GI settings. Anyone else seeing this?
-Nick Pappas
3d Tech Artist at Playful
It generally improves a lot if you are using HDR.
Not sure what you mean. this is baked into the texture. at default settings.
Notice that the banding is mostly in the mid values of the light. This is a simple baked point light casting shadows.It’s not just banding, its gradating between each band. Yeah if i push the light past one i can blow it out but that’s not really a good solution.
Is this a regression compared to earlier betas?
Yes this is a new issue that doesn’t appear to be in earlier betas.
I filed a bug report for it.
Case 742156
So I looked at the actual generated lightmap and it does not have this banding issue. However the display of the lightmap in the unity editor and in builds behaves this way out of the box. I double checked the texture settings and didnt see any red flags, Its uncompressed and I disabled mipmaps.
I always have these types of bandings and I could not solve why it happens in dark scenes. Then I said I think it is about monitor not unity!
From what I’m seeing, this may be caused by texture compression. Is the banding still present if you choose “Truecolor” in the texture’s import settings? (See attached screenshot).
Also, to expand on my first post, I believe having hdr enabled on the camera changes the way the lightmaps are decoded (it definitely happens for the precompute, I’m not 100% sure if it’s the same for the baked lightmaps), so it could reduce banding.
This is not the monitor, Video card nor Texture compression. Have you guys even looked at this in Unity beta5 before replying? This does not happen in Beta 4 or any Beta version before that. It’s a bug. And its a really nasty one.
The bug is in our processing queue for evaluating the repro…
Great catch, repro’ed and forwarded to devs
