At the moment there’s an odd approach to baking APV. When you hit the bake button it at default bakes APV and lightmapping, unless you have no objects in the scene with light mapping enabled.
I think the lightmapping settings need a means to turn off light mapping.
Early tutorials would say use the “bake probe volumes” button but that button has glitches associated with it and it’s so hidden support didn’t seem to know it existed!
The lighting settings really just need an option to turn off lightmapping if you just want APV, especially since the settings have overlap with each other.
Hi. You can disable Lightmapping by simply disabling “Baked Global Illumination” from the Scene tab of lightmapping. With this off, it is possible to bake only APV using the Bake Probe Volumes button
In future design revisions for the Lighting window we do intend to provide explicit control for enabling / disabling lighting systems globally. While today you have the ability to choose whether objects receive lightmaps or light probes from the MeshRenderer, some users have indicated they prefer the ability to disable the system entirely and therefore have the confidence that shader permutation will be reduced.
Maybe I’ve got this wrong but once you uncheck “Baked Global illumination” you can only use realtime lights?
Is it possible to light a scene using baked light (to avoid realtime lights runtime cost and limitations) and no lightmaps but just APV blending ?
Disabling “Baked Global Illumination” will allow you to bake APV but that’s not recommended.
What you should do instead to bake APV only is make sure all mesh renderers have light probes toggled instead of lightmaps for how they receive global illumination.
A script was posted here in this thread to do that quickly for all objects in the scene.
Alternatively, this drop down mentioned in the post was fixed just recently I think, which can just bake probes.
Both methods don’t change the issue that the lights become realtime as soon as you don’t have lightmaps generated.
Either I’m misunderstanding something severely, or there’s a bug or it’s not a supported thing yet although it was stated in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU7X5xICkc8
If you disable baked illumination it gives a message saying that all the lights are overriden to realtime
if you don’t disable baked illumination, but clear baked data and just bake the probe volumes, it won’t say it but it’ll still be overriden (I can see dynamic shadows on dynamic objects even though the light is set to “baked”). In fact it’s even weirder: it seems to bake and apply the probes lighting to objects, but when you start play mode the lights are now realtime (although the probes lighting is still enabled).
EDIT: Now that I understand a bit more about it, I can see that what I’m describing is exactly the symptoms of the bug linked a few posts earlier. Sorry for the noise. So as far as I understand it, because of this bug, this scenario (probe only lighting) is not possible right now.
No it does work, what you need to use is use the former method of making all objects have probe lighting for global illumination, then simply hit the normal bake button, not the dropdown menu.
I don’t know which version has the fix for the dropdown menu yet.
It “works” in the sense that it is baking the probes and the objects will be affected by them.
But the lights will be realtime and therefore there will be a limit to them, there will be realtime shadows etc…
I would want my probes to be baked AND my lights not having realtime properties, and right now it can’t be done.
The only way that I see is you have to bake the probes and then disable the lights. Workflow seems a bit off.
