Unity 2018 - Struggeling to get a decent GI bake/look

Bumblebee

So I have been spending my time trying to learn unity and I am just frustrated with the lighting, in particular the GI. I have followed many tutorials but i just cannot seem to make it look correct. I follow tutorials of people and my scenes end up having seams on the primitives and sometimes visible seams between the modular meshes. It just doesnt look correct on my end. I am running unity on a laptop atm, a GTX 675mx with 4 gigs of vram and a ok-ish cpu

However, like I said the light bakes never look good on my end and I am frustrated as hell

as you can see it just looks weird and low res or something.

RyanB

Progressive lightmapper creates seams and other weird glitches with shadows.  It's fast but not as accurate.

Bumblebee

the thing is when I watch tutorials, they dont seem to have these issues. Their maps seem flawless every time

RyanB

Bumblebee said:

the thing is when I watch tutorials, they dont seem to have these issues. Their maps seem flawless every time

Progressive lightmapper works fine but sometimes you have to adjust things in your scene.  I don't have your scene in front of me so I can only guess what might help.

Your scene definitely has some sort of lightmap UV problem or lightmap scale problem.  Check the lightmap UVs on your imported meshes.  The tunnel walls and pipes are ok but the grates, sidewalk pieces and other things on the ground are obvious problems.

Turn on "Generate Lightmap UVs" on the import settings for each imported mesh to see if there is a big difference.  Also check your lightmap scale on the mesh renderers.

Bumblebee

I am going crazy with this engine. Now can someone explain why the GI doesnt affect the sphere? I also had to put the lightmap resolution up to 10 to make the ugly seams go away in the walls and I ve read someone that its wayyy to high? Normally 4 should be enough for indoors but such a simple scene shows me so many errors with 4 so how can I expect decent bake times with larger scenes? Anyway the main issue is this, the blue sphere isnt reflected by GI, i dont see blue bounces anywhere...

Bumblebee

here i used 4 LM resolution

Eric Chadwick

What does the lightmap checker look like on your baked scene?

RyanB

This took about five minutes to set up so the settings are default.  The walls and floors are built from scaled cubes so there is a split in the middle of the walls and floor.  There is no visible seam in the lightmaps.  I lowered the indirect resolution to 0.2 to speed it up, it takes about 30 seconds to bake the lightmaps.  Default material on walls and floor, standard material with no maps and albedo coloured blue.  Note also the blue sphere is being picked up by the floors and walls without any emission from the sphere.  Increasing the intensity of the direct light or making the sphere material emit would increase the intensity of the blue.  Normally, I would use an HDR on the sky to add some subtle colour variations.

Bumblebee

I am using the progressive lightmapper but I have been told enlighten was outdated(?)

So today I had attempted a new scene. And I really dont know what to do with unity. It feels like everytime I try again I run into new issues and its really freaking me out. So here I am using 150 texels per unit which according to the wiki is way too much but I still get bad quality in the bakes. What the hell is going on. Again all scenes are in static.

I turned on realtime GI after experimenting with baked only and see what happens:

I am really beginning to give up on unity. It is just so inconsitent and random that its not even pleasent anymore. Again if I am doing a rookie mistake or something (because all the tutorials I watch, they have nice results) then please do let me know.

PS the error is showing overlapped UVs because of modular meshes, however in the import settings I made sure to tick "generate lightmap uvs"

Bumblebee

tried enlighten. Well...

RyanB

You are using an imported mesh named "scene 1 .FBX" but you have visible seams on all of your quads and light leaking through the edge.  You probably have unwelded verts on every quad. 

The resolution settings you chose are ridiculously high.

I'm also wondering what the scale of your scene is with the imported mesh.  A common problem is for people to import meshes at huge scales.  Create a default cube in Unity with scale 1x1x1 and compare to the imported mesh. 

You've made 29 512x512 lightmaps for a single hallway which indicates something is wrong.  In my posted example, the default settings made a single 1024x1024 for 13 cubes plus a sphere.

Bumblebee

Hey,

Yes there are unwelded seams because those are modular pieces. I assembled the scene in 3ds max as a modular environment as alot of studios do modularity and it has obvious benefits.

in this example I had made sure to have a more reasonable scale. It was definitely well sized and good relative to the camera. If unity cant handle modular pieces (which it should since I have seen people use it with no problems) then idk

Eric Chadwick

What size are your pieces, in units? IIRC Unity assumes 1 unit = 1 meter.

Bumblebee

yea i had tried to follow a correct scale. i made sure it wasnt too big

HAWK12HT

Finally my moment to shine
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/N5qKwb

Are you having troubles with Unity GI bakes..well have no fear HAWK is here XD 

Alright Unity GI is like a cat you have to deal with it patiently. 

First off make sure your project is on correct console as in PC or mobile device. Clear GI cache 
Turn off everything in Lightmapper enviro settings, 0 skybox bounce, ambient color to black, turn off compress lightmaps. 
Make sure you have nice 2nd UV for lightmap and its UV seams matches your smoothing group on model (VERY IMPORTANT)  and also very confusing even for me at times cause less lightmap UV chunks = faster bake times during Unity light charting process (both for baked and realtime lighting) 

Have some 50% grey texture on your assets, I have notice at times a simple default white material mess up lighting. Plus at the end of the day your lighting will be bounced around with albedo and will affect the final look so having a grey texture helps visually identify direct / indirect light bounces. 

Set your res to 1 and lightmap res to also 1 and show us how your UV charts look in Unity. (note this is Unity Light Charts not lightmap uvs) 

  

cptSwing

Make sure you have nice 2nd UV for lightmap and its UV seams matches your smoothing group on model (VERY IMPORTANT)  

Huh, really? Never tried that.

Noors

I strongly recommend Bakery asset to anyone being serious at baking for the time being. All Unity stuff is still wip. Like releasing a year ago a lightmapper cpu based and no denoising. Please...

Unity is surely filling the gap with UE on the graphics side, but there's still work to do.

Bumblebee

Yea i switched to unreal as their lighting solutions were less of a heachache to me

cptSwing

Noors said:

I strongly recommend Bakery asset to anyone being serious at baking for the time being. All Unity stuff is still wip. Like releasing a year ago a lightmapper cpu based and no denoising. Please...

Unity is surely filling the gap with UE on the graphics side, but there's still work to do.

Damnit, just got a new rig and opted for an AMD card (first one since ages ago). First and likely not last time I'll regret it, haha.

Mehran Khan

I use bakery all the time and it's veeeeery good.  can't recommend it enough for lighting artists.

HAWK12HT

@cptSwing here https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LightingGiUvs-ImportingFromMaya.html   

I prefer manual control on my uvs so I also copy paste UV2 (lightmaps) to UV3 (Realtime lightmaps) for Unity. There is a bug I am encountering where Unity ignores UV2 and takes UV3 for light bake even though my scene has nothing Realtime, reported this to Unity so many times already.