Any more information about the progressive lightmapper?

Can we get some more information about the development of the progressive lightmapper? In september it was said to be released "soon" and now it is the end of January. Some estimated time would have been great to have.

 

Yeah I'm starting to think it's not gonna be in 5.6, and for me it's the most important new feature...

 

It is orange on the roadmap for 5.6 so I think there is a good chance it will slip to a later version.

 

I'm guessing it'll become one of the main selling points of 'Unity 2017'

Really hoping that lightprobes get some attention/testing this time (baked, diffuse-only, mobile style), after they were broken for so long following the launch of 5.0

 

better not be a commercial decision, I'm confident it will come in 5.6 even when its end of february

 

The following quote is from their Subscription! Why? blog-post from June 2016.

According to this information, I don't assume they hold the new lightmapper back for 2017. It's probably just not ready yet.

 

Looks like it made it into beta 6, albeit with the experimental tag Not tried it myself yet.

 

Had a very quick play with it, and it certainly looked promising.

Only tried it in a scene made of copy+pasted cubes, so not a good stress test - but it was working well there. The big win will be getting very quick previews of light colour/intensity rather than editing blind. It's also nice to see an ETA on the bake progress bar!

 

YAY!

 

yea thanks for this release!


I hope undo will be integrated too, because now when I move a static object in my scene a new bake is triggered wich is normal, but if I undo this move a new bake is also triggered, and ideally it would just resume the old bake, but it starts from the begining.

 

DOUBLE YAY!!! ABOUT DAMN TIME!!!

 

Yes, right now we don't use the GI cache much yet, but we will use it more going forward and that will make undo work much better.

 

So, I eagerly downloaded the new beta and got testing the new lightmapper! I was trying bunch of our scenes (mobile game so fully baked stuff). While the new workflow and iteration speed is awesome, I couldn't help but notice weird artefacts in all our scenes. Basically some areas were left black, while Enlighten baked them properly (albeit very slowly). I did wait for the whole lightmap to finish, but couldn't find an obvious way to get rid of the black parts. I noticed they almost baked correctly with very low resolution settings (like 2 texels) but with proper resolutions I couldn't get rid of the black. I can post screenshots tomorrow, forgot to take any.

So it was a bit disappointing to not get correct bakes.. On the other hand the iteration speed was really nice even on the not-too-beefy laptop I tested on.

Anyone else get problematic areas in the bake?

 

Could it be that the progressive lightmapper can only be used to bake non directional lightmaps? At least it seems like i can't change to directional mode anymore...

 

@mh114, is it possible that you have a lot of single-sided geometry and the parts of the geometry that turned out black were seeing a lot of backfaces?
If so, please adjust the 'Backface Tolerance' on the LightmapSettings asset that you're using.

If that's not it, we would really appreciate a bug report with the problematic piece of geometry and it's surroundings.

 

I am almost TEMPTED to download this and play with this. Baking with Enlighten has been the BANE of my development.

 

@Kuba , @kemalakay Thanks for the suggestion, I will try it tomorrow when I get back to work!

 

Man this light baker is awesome! It's fast, looks really good and damn I finally enjoying light baking again!

 

Thanks again, that was the trick! I set the backface tolerance to zero, now the scenes bake nicely and very quickly, too. Awesome job on the new lightmapper!