Unite Keynote

monster

I had the opportunity to speak at the Unite 2016 keynote! Unity is making a big effort to make art tools more friendly and as a tech artist that's been my job for many years. My talk is over the new Progressive Lightmapper. They are hoping to have an experimental build out soon here: http://unity3d.com/experimental

A couple of funny notes. The light baking is so fast that halfway through I have to Clear Baked Data to keep showing the features. The entire level bakes in about 1 minute compared to the current Enlighten engine that takes about half an hour (optimized and on low settings). The quality settings are what I consider first pass, but a shipping quality bake only takes about 15 minutes. I didn't make any of the art in the demo (I'm an animator), but we have an amazing art team at Playful that put it together.



The art tools start at 44:32 and my light mapping talk starts at 1:00:38.
https://youtu.be/h5iBcVYluRs

BTW, we are currently hiring experienced environment / zbrush / hard surface artists.
http://polycount.com/discussion/178589/playful-environment-artists-wanted-near-dallas-tx#latest

ZacD

Good job with the keynote, awesome looking feature. I know a lot of artists are hoping we move past baked lighting, but with VR especially, it looks like we will be stuck with it for a while longer. I hope this pushes Epic to add similar features to UE4. 

MikeF

Oh man, that new lighting system looks amazing! Enlighten has been the single biggest pain in moving from 4 to 5, this looks to be bridging the gap. Those render times alone make it worthwhile

rollin

Ha, that's you!! Saw the screenshot on the unity blog but didn't expect you. Nice one!

cptSwing

Cool, congrats! Can't wait to play with the new baking system, have torn out enough of my hair using Enlighten. Are there mobile-friendly options such as easily determining output lightmap texture size, ordering certain areas to certain atlas textures and so on and so forth?

monster

@cptSwing

"Are there mobile-friendly options such as easily determining output lightmap texture size..."

You still gotta fiddle with the resolution but...

"...ordering certain areas to certain atlas textures and so on and so forth?"

...you can use the Baked Tag in the lightmap parameters to assign objects to a particular lightmap.

You can do this with enlighten already. It's one of the key features that helped my demo render quickly too.

Ged

thats cool, Id like a sort of "fit all selected to lightmap" option. Like heres my level in unity now lets fit all these modular wall bits on a 1024 and these modular floor bits on a 1024. And it auto rotates and scales uvs etc like 3dcoat to pack in more if you want it, that would be cool too. 

Personally I was really impressed by the animation / cinematic sequencer, that would be so useful sometimes and theres nothing in unity currently to help with that.

cptSwing

monster said:

@cptSwing

"Are there mobile-friendly options such as easily determining output lightmap texture size..."

You still gotta fiddle with the resolution but...

It'd be lovely to just say - "Well, our lightmap budget is exactly 2x 2048, so arrange things accordingly kthxbye." .. so fiddly with Enlighten, output size being dependant on a larg-ish number of factors..

"...ordering certain areas to certain atlas textures and so on and so forth?"

...you can use the Baked Tag in the lightmap parameters to assign objects to a particular lightmap.

You can do this with enlighten already. It's one of the key features that helped my demo render quickly too.

Ah, great. That looks like a good addition.. defining areas within the map might be a bit next-level/anal
And yeah, I did read it being possible in Enlighten, but would need to be scripted AFAIR?

Thanks for the answer anyway. The game looks lovely, and congrats on the keynote appearance