Bakery - GPU Lightmapper (v1.96) + RTPreview [RELEASED]

Me I keep getting this error no matter what settings I use.
My setup is R5 2600, GTX 1080 and 16Gb 3000Mhz.
I'm sorry, i'm just a newbie, what should i do?

 

You're running out of regular RAM memory.
That's weird because windows is supposed to use the disk when this happens.
Are you on a 32bit version of windows?
On 32bit OS this can happen easily.
This could happen too on 64bits OS with 32bits apps, but the Unity editor is supposed to run in 64bits mode now.

 

I'm looking for some clarification on how the bitmasks work. I had a look at the docs and comments here.

If I have two "rooms" that I want to lightmap seperately (so that the lights in one room don't affect the lights in the other).

It seems that all I have to do is set all of the Bakery lights in Room A to have a bitmask of 0, and then set all of the lights in Room B to have a bitmask of 1.

And then I add an LM Group to each of those rooms (the parent) with the corresponding bitmask (0 for Room A, 1 for Room B).

However what happens if I want to have more than 32 seperate areas? Is a true bitmask required here or can a simple integer be hacked in instead? In my game I have about 50-100 "rooms" or areas that I want to lightmap seperately. I can do this by physically moving them far away from each other however then the bake takes a lot longer (hours vs. minutes) and I also run into light bleed problems.

How far does indirect light bounce if I put the rooms very far apart in my scene?

Any suggestions?

 

You could put walls with a lightmap scale size of zero between zones to prevent light leaking between zones.
This way the walls will not use any lightmap space but still prevent light from passing.

 

Hello! After installing on Unity 2019.3.6f1 (64-bit), 3 errors appeared:

Assets\Editor\x64\Bakery\scripts\ftRenderLightmap.cs(2577,55): error CS0619: 'LightmapEditorSettings.Lightmapper.Radiosity' is obsolete: 'Use Lightmapper.Enlighten instead. (UnityUpgradable) -> UnityEditor.LightmapEditorSettings/Lightmapper.Enlighten'

Assets\Editor\x64\Bakery\scripts\ftRenderLightmap.cs(2590,58): error CS0619: 'LightmapEditorSettings.Lightmapper.PathTracer' is obsolete: 'Use Lightmapper.ProgressiveCPU instead. (UnityUpgradable) -> UnityEditor.LightmapEditorSettings/Lightmapper.ProgressiveCPU'

Assets\Editor\x64\Bakery\scripts\ftRenderLightmap.cs(4248,55): error CS0619: 'LightmapEditorSettings.Lightmapper.Radiosity' is obsolete: 'Use Lightmapper.Enlighten instead. (UnityUpgradable) -> UnityEditor.LightmapEditorSettings/Lightmapper.Enlighten'

 

Reimport Bakery and tell Unity to auto-upgrade the project when asked. (a window should pop up and ask for confirmation automatically)

 

I'm a little confused: what is the difference between this and the built-in GPU lightmapper? Are there comparison screenshots somewhere, or a writeup somewhere?

 

The main differences are:
Bakery is WAY faster and rock solid stable compared to Unity's GPU lightmapper. (an even more so if you have an RTX graphics card)
Bakery does an excellent job avoiding light leaking through walls, unlike Unity's lightmapper.
Bakery includes an additional lightmap technique not available by default in Unity with much better quality (but you will have to use Bakery's supplied shaders for your objects)
Bakery does a much better job packing individual lightmaps into atlas textures, which gives you more lightmap definition with the same lightmap texture sizes.
Bakery is much more flexible than the stock lightmapper, giving you the ability to render prefabs independently from the scene and reuse them on other scenes.
Bakery includes a batch render to render multiple scenes with a single click.

However, Bakery as some inconvenients:
You NEED a modern Nvidia GPU or it will not work.
There are 2 types of light probe generation:
On legacy mode, rendering the light probes is much slower compared to built-in lightmapper and requires you to not change focus from the Unity editor to another window or the light probes will get corrupted.
On L1 mode, the rendering is super fast but the light quality is much lower than Legacy mode or built-in.
Neither modes do any de-ringing of the light probes, unlike current Unity's built-in lightmapper, so intense lighting "overshoots" to the other side. (a problem inherent to light probes and only recently solved by the Unity team)
The author of Bakery is currently making a new light probe rendering mode that will be as fast as L1 and as accurate as the legacy mode.
You have to manually put a Bakery Light component on each light object in your scene and push a button to synchronize the Bakery light to the actual Unity light every time you change its color or intensity. (the same goes for the skybox)
Bakery doesn not include any post process to blur the resulting lightmaps, unlike Unity's built-in lightmapper. (this is useful to render at lower resolutions and hide the aliasing on hard shadows)

Overall, I can say I'm VERY happy with Bakery and any issue or inconvenience is greatly outweighed by it's speed and quality.

 

That's a good suggestion. I did actually do that on earlier tests (but I didn't put the scale to zero) and it helped somewhat.

However the issues I have are around baking speeds. It seems a lot faster when rooms are on different bits as I'm assuming it doesn't attempt to perform calculations against other rooms it won't be able to see. So that's my main reason for wanting to use this system.

And the other thing is automation. I don't want to manually build walls around each room in my scene as that would be time consuming. I have most of my lightbaking setup automatically now (placing bakery lights, etc.) so it would be good to automate this too. But automatically placing some cubes around a room isn't impossible I suppose!

 

Incredible answer, thanks!

You mentioned lighting accuracy, sort of. I have an issue where some of my naturamanufacture 'scarpes get these white squares on them when i bake a lightmap. Is bakery better about that sort of thing?

 

I haven't used this particular asset, so it could be another issue.
What Bakery is really better at is with light leaking through walls or static objects that cross walls and are lit both inside and outside the room.

 

You can even disable the walls gameobjects in the scene and still force them to be rendered by putting the "Bakery Always Render" component on them.

 

can generated light map be stored at prefab level ?

I generally use environment as prefab and load it runtime .

 

Yes.
See the manual here.

 

Thanks ,
Let me check.

 

For now it's either LODs or groups. Will be improved a bit later.
Also automatic atlasing was significantly improved, so maybe there are less obvious reasons now..

I assume it's not literally a cube?

What error message do you receive? RAM and VRAM are different. If you get "out of memory" message box from ftrace, then it's VRAM.

Generally yes, it can happen (mentioned in Limitations) since you use your memory for both Unity rendering the whole scene and RTPreview tracing it. Baking sidesteps the problem by unloading Unity scene.

It is indeed tricky to get full terrain albedo from Unity. What Bakery does is applying a primitive terrain shader (ftUnlitTerrain.shader) that only shows terrain base map and rendering it to a texture.
Unity terrains automatically generate this "base map" out of whatever real shader is applied to them and use it for LOD rendering. If Bakery captures a splat map instead... sounds like your shader is not configured correctly to generate base maps? I'm not sure how Unity terrain shaders should be written, but you should check if your terrain LODs use the correct base map. Maybe your splat map uses _MainTex name, conflicting with the default base map name?

Please check and tell the last lines printed to .ftracelog.txt after it happens.

Try:
- Reducing texels per unit
- If terrains are used, enable terrain optimization
- If terrains have painted foliage, disable "export terrain trees"

Possibly bake them in separate scenes instead?
I could do integer instead of bitmask, but then it won't allow other tricks like having some global lights (sun/sky?) that must affect all rooms.

Infinitely far, but hit probability decreases with distance.

Also a valid option.

Note that if light's bounding box (based on its range) doesn't intersect room group's bounding box, it will be omitted from the group. So technically you can use the same bitmask for multiple rooms and if lights from one room don't intersect another room, it should be as fast as if you had separate light set for each room.

Not anymore if you don't combine it with LMGroups and use automatic atlasing.

 

Cool! thanks

 

Hi Frank,

I´m getting an out of memory exception when deploying to Oculus Quest scenes baked with bakery:
Thread-3 Warning 475.628194 <sharedmem_gpuobj_alloc:2713>: sharedmem_gpumem_alloc: mmap failed errno 12 Out of memory
Thread-3 Error 475.633250 <gsl_memory_alloc_pure:2326>: GSL MEM ERROR: kgsl_sharedmem_alloc ioctl failed.

It completely crashes the device, this does not happen when I use the standard Unity lightmapper. I´m using the same texture resolution settings (1024px).

Do you have any idea why?

Thanks.

 

I'm developing for the Oculus Quest too and I have no problems with Bakery lightmaps. (several 4k x 4k directional lightmaps and 70000 light probes running at 72fps)
Do you have more details from the android logcat?

 

No, just this... I have 270 1024px lightmaps, it´s an outdoor scene. What's odd is that Unity has no problem in managing this amount of lightmaps when generates them using it´s own lightmapper.

 

Try with a new project with just the bare minimum to test it: oculus integration asset, Unity XR Management package + oculus plugins, Android LogCat package and Bakery.
Test Bakery with an Oculus sample like the Locomotion scene.

 

Thanks atomicjoe, but I'd prefer to have an official response from the developer. It's clearly something related to bakery, Unity doesn't generate this error. I'd like to know if it's something he is aware of, or knowing how the tool works from the inside, might have an intuition on why this might happen.

 

Ok

 

Yes, i'm running a 64bit OS.

 

Do as Frank said up there:

 

Hi, can anyone advise what might be causing the speedtrees in my scene to have black textures when building (but look fine in the editor)?

After fiddling around with lightmap scale and resolution etc Bakery works through and *does* the baking, and it looks fine in the editor. However after creating a build, all the trees have pitch black textures.

The trees are in prefabs and marked as static (they don't animate). I have one tree that isn't in a prefab (for testing) but that still has a black texture.

The scene has one main directional light for the Sun, set as a Mixed light and I'm doing a full lighting render in bakery.

There are 6 additional direct lights (samples = 0) to add additional ambient lighting because the shadows from the sun were too dark (pitch black actually).

Can anyone offer a few pointers as to what might be causing the black textures in the build?

I'm using the latest Bakery version (1.71) on Unity 2018.2.21f1.

As an aside, is it possible to adjust the baked shadow strength so they're not so absolute from the main directional light (sun)? I could get rid of the six direct lights then.

Thanks.

 

I don't know why this is happening, but you can use lightprobes for the trees and set them to contribute to GI with a lightmap size of zero with very good results. This way the trees will cast shadows over the scene yet will be lit themselves by lightprobes and can be animated too. Just be sure to disable all the trees before rendering the lightprobes, because otherwise they will be obscured by the trees when rendered. (you disable the trees to render only the lightprobes and then re-enable them once the lightprobe have been rendered)
I don't even know how you managed to correctly bake Speedtrees without having black bands between the trunk and the branches.
I always use lightprobes for the trees because of this.

 

Mmmm... now that I think about it, maaaybe it's because Speedtrees don't keep the lightmap UVs on builds.
This is part of the "Mesh Optimization" process Unity does when building.
Try disabling "Optimize Mesh Data" on the Player options and build again.

 

Hi @atomicjoe many thanks for the pointers.

So you don't set your speedtrees as static for baking then? Mine don't animate as I need detailed colliders on them, so they're all fixed in place and marked as static, but you're giving me the impression that they shouldn't be baked at all anyway.

The speedtrees are baked in the editor but there's obviously some cheating going on here, as they are just pure black in the build. Why Unity have managed to have something working in the editor but not the build is anyone's guess!

That Optimize Mesh Data option seemed like the holy grail of ideas! But alas it didn't work!

But is that really the case regarding speedtrees not keeping the lightmap UVs in builds? Which genius at Unity/Speedtree thought that was a good idea?

I've been banging my head trying to get this scene to bake for a few days now. If these trees aren't going to play ball then I'm going to have to switch back to realtime lighting and try optimizing the scene another way unfortunately. Time to have a look at using imposters, although I wouldn't be at all surprised if these speedtrees have another chapter of fun waiting for me on that front too....

 

I'm pleased to report that I got the speedtrees working properly in the build by setting the Shader Stripping -> Lightmap Modes setting (in the project's Graphics Settings) to custom and just leaving all the options selected. Took a while to build (so I'll whittle down which options are really needed later), but the lightmaps are now baked on the speedtrees in the build!

Thanks for your help again @atomicjoe. The Optimize Mesh Data option sent me along the right path to fix this!

 

You should also look at the MTREE tree generator in the store.
It lets you create your trees with the exact parameters you want and generates regular geometry after that with LODs and wind and everything.
Really worth it.

 

Hey thanks for the advice!

 

Thanks for this, I hadn't seen this option. And thanks for all the help you've been giving everyone. Are you working for Bakery now?

I just bought a RTX 2080 Ti pretty much for Bakery RTX rendering (NVIDIA will be happy)... and a little gaming.

It's been well worth it for me. I have a small scene with 3 rooms in it and 40 bakery lights. With my previous GTX 1080Ti this took 12 minutes 54 seconds on high settings (Indirect, 5 GI bounces 50 samples, 2k maps, AO pass). This was already very fast, however the RTX 2080Ti with the RTX option enabled has brought this down to 3 minutes 41 seconds. And most of that time was spent in denoising.

With denoising turned off, the same scene is rendered in 1 minute 22 seconds!

Summary:
GTX 1080 Ti - 12 minutes 54 seconds
RTX 2080 Ti (RTX mode) - 3 minutes 41 seconds
RTX 2080 Ti (RTX mode, no denoise) - 1 minute 22 seconds

 

Thanks, I've got a few ideas of how to tackle it now. I've put LMGroups on each room, cycling through different bits for each one.

newGroup.bitmask = 1 << (i % 31);

And when I run past the 32 I can just loop around (since they won't intersect anyway as you said).

I'll do a longer post here sometime on my workflow, but here's what I'm automating right now through editor scripts:

- mark objects as static (basically checks for rigid body components)
- add Bakery lights to all Unity light components so that they match
- add Light Map Groups to all "rooms" and set the bits for Bakery lights to the rooms they are in
- run Bakery bake
- save lightmap prefabs (custom prefab lightmap script that I mentioned earlier, as I need childed prefabs)

My project is probably different to most people's however automatically adding the Bakery lights to Unity lights is the most useful part, as I can't think of a situation where I'd want the Bakery light to be different to the Unity light. This step stops me forgetting to add them or needing to check that the intensities are the same.

Happy to share this automation with you @guycalledfrank if you're interested, but it's just a hack together of your code anyway.

 

I'm just full-time coding and connected to the internet, and since I'm subscribed to this thread, every time someone posts I get an email. Then helping others gives me an excuse to procrastinate and cool down my brain
You're all just an excuse for me to procrastinate

WOW!
I bought an RTX2070 just for Bakery and it did halve render times by two from my GTX1080, but I didn't expect an RTX2080Ti to make so much of a difference!
(I got the 2070 dirty cheap though)

 

Hi, I've completely forgot about the Bakery issue and updated my video drivers.

Now lightmaps with Denoise enabled are overlit (White spots on the LM's).

I'm using Bakery 1.71, Unity 2019.3.7f1, HDRP 7.1.8.
(Note that this issue is also persists on the previous versions / built-in and tied directly to the newer drivers)

Right now I've just disabled Denoise feature.
Is there anything that can be done with it? (Except rolling back drivers?)

 

Will there in the future be options to tweak hole filling? Sometimes we get overlaps and then we have to disable that option. No rush. Just curious.

 

Hi,
I am trying to use bakery for an android build (Quest). No matter which settings I am using, I get pretty ugly results (fragmented/pixelated shadows) - see attached pictures.

The setup:

• a very basic scene (not many objects, only planes and cubes)
• only basic materials without textures
• legacy pipeline, standard shaders
• GLES3
  
• ASTC
• only baked lights
• one directional light (setup as described in the docu), one refelction probe
• standard player and quality settings for android/quest

What I tried so far:

• use very high setttings (as well as lower ones): 100 texels, 100 samples, 4k resolution
• tried all render and directional modes
• lightmap encoding from low to high
• disabled compression
• checked baked lightmap in "shaded dropdown" - looks good (and detailed) so far

I'd really like to use this and hoped by buying I'd get a better solution than the built in unity lightmapper. The results do look a little better but as this is for vr and you can stand right in front of the shadow i need high detailed shadows without any fragmentation.

Hope someone can help!
Thanks,
Hannes

 

What you are seeing are the ASTC compression artifacts plus the 8bits display depth limitation.
Sadly, this is the maximum quality you can have on Android right now without using uncompressed textures or deeply customizing Unity.
If you really need maximum quality, your only option is to use uncompressed textures.
Otherwise, use some textures on your materials to hide the lightmaps compression artifacts.

Try also disabling Bakery's denoiser and setting samples to 64 and bounces to 5.
The denoiser can make weird colored banding artifacts.

 

Also, as Bakery is using Nvidia's OptiX GPU rendering, it's possible the renders don't have as much color accuracy than a full CPU renderer because of floating point errors.
I have found that manually blurring the lightmaps do fix some of the colored banding too.

Also, keep in mind Unity encodes Android lightmaps in 8bit per channel textures and then multiply them by 2, so without customizing Unity there's not a lot you can do.

 

Thanks for the fast response! I tried setting the lightmaps to compression: none, but without any changes. I wouldnt mind using uncompressed lightmaps, as the scene is pretty small (only a room , 20*20*20 units) and they wouldnt take that much space.
I did use the settings (64, 5) you are suggesting, without much success.
Will try disabling the denoiser (advanced settings, right?).

If this really is the output for android this is a little sad imho as in the description it says its for all platforms. Lightmaps in this quality are far from production ready so this shouldnt be advertised as usable for android as the only advantage to the legacy lightmapper besides rendering speed is the quality of the lightmap. In my case the unity lightmapper is a lot slower but the results are pretty much the same (which is the reason i bought this, i hoped to get better results)...

 

If you get the same quality from Unity's built-in lightmapper than from Bakery, then it's a Unity and Android limitation, not Bakery's fault.
And as not being ready for production, well, it's the state of things on Unity Android development and thus Oculus Quest.
You have to learn the limitations of the platform and adapt to them.
If you want raw power, develop for VR on PC instead.
It's already a miracle we can have this level of performance on mobile hardware!

 

Certainly you must be using lower resolution lightmaps (or different compression) with the built-in lightmapper. Try reducing texels per unit?

Amazing finding. I wouldn't guess! Added to the wiki: https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.p...ook_fine_in_the_editor.2C_but_black_in_builds

atomicjoe is on a roll!
Thank you very much for helping others!

Why not? I can share it on the wiki or possibly integrate. Could be awesome.

Try legacy denoiser? https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Manual#Legacy_denoiser

I didn't code it, it uses (very slighting modified) xatlas: https://github.com/jpcy/xatlas
(which in turn is a modified version of thekla_atlas: https://github.com/Thekla/thekla_atlas)
I didn't see it producing any overlaps before though (at least during packing, not unwrapping)... If you can send me a package with this problem, I can check if I can change some part to fix it, and if not, will post this model to the dev so they can figure it out.

Disabled compression is the best you can get on Android. But Unity still uses 8-bit textures on mobile which don't give enough precision, even uncompressed.
https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.p...id_project.2C_and_lightmaps_don.27t_look_good

Weird, didn't realize it can make any difference. Would be interesting to see some before/after pics (also with/without denoising to see if it's the denoiser to blame or general rendering precision...).

Lightmaps are lightmaps, original HDR textures you get from Bakery have full quality. The way Unity compresses them on various platforms is something I can't change unfortunately.
COD Mobile was released with this though. Somehow (although devs are super-smart and have source access so it's possible they altered the encoding).

Technically using RGBM encoding is totally OK on mobile and should be the way (we did so in Playcanvas). It has decent quality, so I'm not sure why Unity is forcing DoubleLDR for anything that is not ETC1-compressed.

 

I does make a difference on very subtle gradient zones. I think it's the general rendering precision, but using the denoiser + Android build makes it much more visible (even on uncompressed textures).

 

I wonder what is the RGB difference between two colors you see and if blurring just widens their areas...

 

Thanks for the reply. Id didnt want to rant, its a great asset. I just was a little dissappointed that it looked so crappy on android. Disabling the denoiser helped a little.

However I'd like an overview for the best results in android (all settings) if possible.

 

No that's not it: there are greenish bands right after baking that get smoothed out applying some blur. (although you have to apply a large radius blur to completely smooth it out)
The green bands remember me the 16bits color quantization: since on 16bits there are more bits for the green channel than the red and blue ones, it's easy to see greenish bands on gradients because green changes more often while red and blue stay in the same shade.
You can see those bands on the screenshots from HanAusBerlin up there.

 

I'm trying to use the area-light example, but it seems to block my direct light. Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks

 

I've been watching this thread as I am interested in this asset and pretty sure I'll buy it eventually. However, right now I'm only working on mobile projects and from the last few posts I've come to understand that on mobile, Bakery only offers bake time improvements? COD Mobile looks great and I assumed the quality they achieved was expected. Are there any other mobile examples you can point me to? Thanks!

 

Hi, just got Bakery yesterday, did bake overnight, but results are bad. I did the test bake before and it worked fine with few objects in the scene. What could be the problem?

(Objects are static, running default settings, with lower resolution and texel amount, all lights have Bakery components attached)