Baked light and metal

How do you make metal look good using baked lights?
This is a very simple scene with 2 lights and 2 reflection probes.
As you can see, the realtime example has interesting highlights and reflections, while the baked example looks dark and boring.

 

DId you ever find the answer to this?

I know that baked lighting cannot show specular and that's the reason for the baked lighting looking flat. I currently have a scene which is made up of a lot of metal and need to light it properly.

 

You could add some fake cubemaps with a bunch of fake highlights in them and force these meshes to use them.

 

Try the asset "Bakery" on the asset store. Its a light baking asset and allows specular in baked lights. I recently went through this same issue and it was worth the change.

 

Interesting about the fake cubemaps. I was thinking about something similar in that I was going to use a reflection probe located in a different area of the scene that is setup differently and have the offending meshes use that one instead.

I own the Bakery asset. I didn't know it did that with specular baked lights..

The only thing that I found off putting with that asset is that the lightmaps done the same way as the normal lightmaps. Not sure if it can be setup exactly the same.

 

Yes I found the answer! I completely ditched point lights and relied on emissive materials instead, along with a bloom post processing effect. This way, the emissive highlightshighlight into the cubemap, and that's what makes it shine.

 

Very interesting solution...I will give that a try.

Thanks a lot for responding!

 

I use a similar trick quite often for VR projects - increase emissive material strength of lights and bake reflection probes. Specular highlights tend to cause a lot of aliasing and and have a computational overhead so this trick is useful for VR.