2. Ciro Continisio
Technical Evangelist
Unity Technologies

3. Lighting and GI

4. Progressive Lightmapper
Introduced in 5.6 - Now feature complete

5. Progressive Lightmapper

6. Progressive Lightmapper
Soft shadows
Area lights
and emissive

8. Prioritize View

9. Prioritize View
• Will start baking what is framed in the Scene View first
• Once it’s done, it will bake the rest

12. Force Stop

13. Force Stop
• Gathers all the data baked so far, and finalises it
• Filtering
• Baking light probes and reflection probes
• If you bake again, Unity resumes where you left!

15. Samples and Lightmap Resolution

16. Texel Resolution
• Start with a very low resolution to iterate quickly (10-15)
• Don’t inspect the game with the eyes of a creator…
• … but think of how the player will see it!
• You always need a lower resolution than you think!

17. Texel Resolution

18. Texel Resolution per object
Higher res
in foreground
Very low res
in background
Per object (or prefab)

19. Samples
• Each texel will shoot these many samples

20. Direct Samples
Emitted
Finds light

21. Indirect Samples
Bounces x times
EmittedFinds skybox

22. Light Bounces

23. Light bounces
Even softer shadows
Light recessesDark areas

24. How many bounces?
1 Bounce
3 min
2 Bounces
5 min

25. Filtering

26. Filtering
Filtering is an operation that smooths out the result of the bake.
• Happens after the bake
• Happens even if Force Stop is pressed
• Can be None, Auto or Advanced
• If you want to change filtering, you don’t need to bake again!

27. Filtering
Samples 10/300 - No filtering
3:48
Samples 3/100 - Advanced filtering
1:45

28. • In Advanced: choose between Gaussian and the new A-Trous
• Gaussian smooths A LOT
• A-Trous is edge-aware: preserves hard edges and AO better
Filtering

29. Filtering comparison
Gaussian A-Trous

30. UV Charts

31. UV Charts
Objects are broken down into charts, based on their normals.
• Created when the bake starts, based on the normals of the object
• NOT the same as the ones used by Enlighten for Realtime GI!

32. UV Charts

33. UV Charts
Limits of filtering

34. UV Charts
• You can redo your normals in your modelling package
• Or ask Unity to generate them:

35. UV Charts

36. Light Probes

37. Light Probes
• They allow to capture baked lights to be used for moving objects
• Lay them out in pyramids

38. Light Probes usage
Dark areas
Area lights
and emissives
Coloured lights

40. Light Probes debugging

41. Light Probes trick

42. Mixed Modes

43. Mixed Modes
Mixed Lighting is not an option you turn on/off.
Choose the type:
• Baked Indirect
• Shadowmask
• Subtractive
And then use lights marked as Mixed.

44. Subtractive
• Cheapest of all, but least appealing

45. Baked Indirect
• Bakes indirect light, rest is realtime. CPU expensive, but dynamic

46. Shadowmask
• Most lighting is baked into lightmaps. Cheap and flexible.

47. Distance Shadowmask
• Realtime shadows up close, baked in big environments

48. Various Tips

49. Compression settings
• Iterate faster by keeping probes and lightmaps uncompressed
• Once you are happy with your bake, compress them again

50. Fixing seams
Irregular lighting on a surface, or between adjacent objects which
should be parallel
• They can be particularly annoying in modular 3D art
• Seams can depend on many factors

51. Seams
???

52. Seams

53. Vertex normals

54. UV overlapping

56. Thank you!
Ciro Continisio
@CiroContns
connect.unity.com/u/Ciro
Technical Evangelist
Unity Technologies