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

Must be something about your 3D object. Does it have lightmap UVs? Are they generated by Unity ("Generate Lightmap UVs" on the asset) or custom? Is there something special about this object?

 

Yeah, if I swap the 3D model with a generic Unity sphere or cube, it works just fine, but for some reason it hates my model. Nothing special about it, though, lightmap UV is generated by Unity.

Another question: is there an equivalent to "indirect intensity" in Bakery? So is it possible to render GI brighter than it would appear by default?

 

Interesting. Can you try removing parts of the model until it works? Maybe there is something weird like zero-area triangles, NaN normals, weird materials or something. Although I encountered and fixed all cases like that before, or at least I thought so.

No, because I hate hacks (although may end up adding it some day). Instead of faking increased indirect intensity, you can (and for physically correct result should) increase light brightness. More light emitted -> more light bounced off. Use HDR tonemapping to prevent it from looking overexposed.
Using more GI bounces also helps to make GI brighter, although there is little difference after the 3rd bounce.

 

OK, v1.2 was submitted and should be on the store soon!

Changelog:
- Added Shadowmask
- Added optional ambient occlusion
- Added Backface GI option for translucent surfaces
- Fixed error when baking a scene with missing materials
- Fixed incorrect opacity from built-in trees
- Fixed reflection probes trying to re-render scenes with built-in lightmappers
- Added out-of-bounds UV check
- Fixed "you need to mark objects static" error sometimes happening when rendering probes
- Fixed rendering probes before lightmaps
- Fixed vertex lightmaps sometimes darkening regular lightmaps
- Fixed vertex lightmaps incorrectly rendering meta pass
- Static objects with Scale In Lightmap = 0 now affect GI
- Less memory is allocated during export
- Fixed export crash on large projects
- Fixed remaining problems with negative scale
- Fixed a bug when sometimes loaded scene at runtime didn't have lightmaps applied
- Fixed sometimes generating "debugAlpha" files in the project folder

And while we're waiting, you can take a look at the updated documentation.

 

Pumped!!!!>>>
So, I lost track on what is the status of double sided planes that render both sides, I remember they used to not bake, could you make if it is not yet added that the "double sided GI" or with another method causes both sides to compute lighting or at least the backface get the lighting of the front face. Last one, to me would be good enough trick
EDIT, The documentation as it is now can be edited, may be you should add a higher protection lvl

 

To have different ligthing on each side you would need
- 2 lightmap UVs, one for front, one for back side.
- Special shader that would sample corresponding lightmaps by front/back UVs.
Because of that I don't expect the majority of users to use this feature. Unity auto UV generator can't create additional UVs for backfaces for example, and people expect existing shaders to work.

What you see on backfaces depends completely on the shader you use. Mesh and lightmap only have front face data, and all doublesided shaders will only be able to use that. They can render the exact same color as on front faces. Or darker/brighter/whatever. With real-time lighting you can get proper double-sided effect in the shader, because even if you only have front face normals, you can simply flip them on backfaces and calculate lighting correctly. But because lightmaps don't care about normals and contain already lit surface color, it's not possible with them.

What Backface GI changed though is how light is emitted from back faces during GI calculation. Previously other surfaces seeing backfaces saw no light and could look too dark, while with this feature enabled, some light should leak through.

 

Awesome then I'll try to make the shader simply use the forward facing side lightmap. Enough for me as what I whant is that it does not catch the eye due to unproper lighting not super accurate back lighting.

 

There is a saying it never hurt to ask, but ...
Will this support interval occlusion shadowmapping? For squeezing those puny mobile render

 

Oh, I haven't heard these words in ages. The one with the gas station demo? I remember being impressed 10 years ago or something. I can't the find the demo, but I'm sure I downloaded it before.
Yeah, these are definitely possible to make bake-able if you're not afraid of writing a custom shader or extending a limited one with features you want.
Although it may take so much memory it's not very practical.

 

Yeah, I'm still looking around for alternative, I'm trying to squeeze time of day inside a mali 400 open gl 2.0 for an open world, I'm looking at all alternative as apparently MRT are expensive.

- First I thought of using gradient to cut out shadow, but then I realize pixel can be lit and shadowed multiple time
- so I constrained the sun to vertical only trajectory
- thought about bit packing lighting (decoding using mod and div, can be emulated with frac and *.5)
- Reinvented horizon mapping for heightmap
- reinvented interval mapping then found out about it https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems/gpugems_ch13.html
- realize there is really 4 cases of shadow solution (self occlusion, baked, env to object, object to env)
- realize there is multiple context that can be abused or mix solution (interior, exterior, heightmap, city with cubic shape (ex skyscraper), forest)
- discover AMD cubemap shadowmap for interior after pondering box projected cubemap
- realize I can abuse further constraint of game level design (element placed on AABB grid)
- realize that I can analytically derive occluder for approximation
- realize that SH can be an approximation for some soft case (if only I could understand zonal harmonics)
- realize that I can mix all solution anyway depending on the scene complexity and set up

For example, in a city, I think can basically bake into a very low resolution map (2m sized pixel), where the height is encoded on the side of the pixel, and analytically projected on objects, that would sample the pixel data at their position with a spatial hash.

I'm still experimenting, but I'm kinda scare of rolling a custom baking option, however a single specific format could be baked and then translated into other format, the main issue is just to encode the sequence of lit/shadow per pixel, especially to visualize each area shadow complexity (how many lit sequence there is in that pixel) and decide which sub solution would work best.

 

I think it would be pretty cool to add some sort of scriptable baking to Bakery. E.g. if you could create your own pass, write a CUDA shader for it (sounds scary, but believe me, they are not that hard, and if you can write shaders, you would be able to do that, and I could add a few built-in examples), define the amount/data type of the outputs, etc... Bakery then would act as a framework that smoothly manages scene export/pass execution/import.

 

To ease the agony of the wait for new version I leave here an AO approach I discovered recently. It is lightweight and output is very cool so you may not need high res lightmap to bake AO with Bakery. I searched for this because the AO in stack v2 is awfull IMO.
https://github.com/keijiro/MiniEngineAO
Another one from dame dev. Same dev has another AO solution Ive not tested but the one I post runs also on consoles and is fast so I need no more. I preffer rt AO because it helps to ground players vehicle aswell the whole scenes AO is very well defined.

 

Nice work! Can I ask, if this supports multi scene baking? I need to bake multiple scenes all at once and load the scene additively where the lightmaps only get loaded when the scene(s) are additively loaded. Thanks.

 

It does support it... I'm using it

 

Hi~
I followed your quick tutorial, but the result is strange.
Sample scene are normally baking. but I can't bake a new scene.
I tried the same material and setting as the sample.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d_c34EjuW61X3vy5u3ighDHoNXmmH_F3/view?usp=sharing

I'll wait for your help since I can't solve the problem.

 

Yes!

On Android projects you need to set Encoding to Mobile in Advanced settings.
Also, shouldn't happen anymore after 1.2 is released.

 

1.2 is published!!

 

BOOOoom!! You see that Unity? Learn. This is what WIP feels like, not the geological, forever in preview time scale.
You're one of the top asset devs to me keep up the good work>>

 

Hey, I just picked this up to use in a Hdrp project. Im updating to 2018.2.5 right now to see if it solves some problems, but i want to confirm: I should be able to get this working by adding a bakery point light to my point lights, applying the settings to the bakery lights, enabling shadow masks in the hd settings asset, turning on baked lighting in the lighting window, and baking through your editor, correct? If shadow masks arent working yet, thats fine. I just want some way of seeing what the _environment_ looks like as I build it with semi-proper lighting that doesnt take me 10 years to bake every time I need to update something.

I wasnt seeing any lightmaps from even unity in my prev version, so i want to confirm im not missing anything.

Also, im building my project from modular tiles ... that should lightmap okay, right?

 

Going to add im getting artifacts with realtime GI since switching to tiles instead of large meshes, and it takes forever ... im hoping that switching to yours will fix the quality and speed (going to use shadowmask). My bake time went from 1 hour to bake to 5 minutes using your tool (3 gpus), just as I said, wasnt able to get it to display baked lighting even with enlighten, so hoping an update will fix that. Will post more later or tomorrow when i see if the update fixed things.

 

lightmaps are not apparent if the difuse color is not bright (I use white). Same if shininess in (specular) is , I recall if its high not aparent.
You can check if lightmaps are backed in scene taba, in the dropdown of the scene diplay modes, there is one for lightmaps.

 

Error when Render LightProbeGroup : You need to mark some objects static or add Bakery Lightmap Group Selector components on them. but I`m already marked static object and Rendered . How to fix it ? plz

 

[QUOTE =“luosiri，post：3612115，member：508685”]渲染LightProbeGroup时出错：您需要将某些对象标记为静态或在其上添加Bakery Lightmap组选择器组件。但我已经标记了静态对象和渲染。怎么解决？PLZ [/ QUOTE]
Ø, I saw you are fixed it ,Updating ,thanks for all

 

Hi, a Small request.

Could you put the Sponza Demo, in a separate package inside the main package... so if people want to see it they have to import that other package?

The other demos are small and useful as reference, I think they're Ok in the examples folder, but the sponza one is just too huge, and for some reason Unity wants to re import the .fbx each time I open the project with the examples loaded.

 

Just flagging that the issue I had with lightmaps is a Unity 2018 bug. I updated to 2018.2.5f and the lightmaps are being used, and the screen occasionally turns black, but I just need to resize the game window.

Cant wait until 2018 is more stable . Your lightmapper seems to be working for me so far. Trying to find a lighting setup that gives me the results I want now.

What is the current status on directional / shadowmask? If its in, how do I use it? I need my dynamic objects to cast shadows (ie: doors, monsters).

[Edit -- I'm assuming this is a Unity 2018 bug still. My lightmaps stopped appearing again. The bake worked ... I can see it fine when I switch to view baked lightmap in the scene view. It just stopped using it ... no idea why.]

 

Okay, I'm getting crashes roughly 50% of the time when baking in 2018.2.5f. I don't have a very large scene right now. Granted, it could be that something in my geometry is off ... but complete to-desktop crashes aren't nice even if that is the case. Furthermore ... its sometimes working, which leads me to say the geometry (largely flat planes, some boxes and cylinders ... nothing crazy, its tile based) is not an issue, but who knows. I did bring some of the sliders down a bit just to speed up the bake (8 samples and 1024 tile), and I just brought it up to 16 and 2048 and it worked ... but thats anecdotal, since it may work the next 5 times and then crash. Not sure yet.

 

Correct. Shadow masks should be working too. Also you may want to create a Skylight for ambient lighting.

Yeah, in fact for this guy properly baked modular scenes was an important point: https://twitter.com/lmhpoly/status/1015851305615740928

I can, but you can also just remove the checkbox from Sponza when importing the package. It may look like the package is huge because of Sponza, but in fact most of its size is a huge 200mb Nvidia DLL used by denoiser
I'm just afraid that if I put it in a separate package, then nobody will ever find it.

Like literally every time? More than once or even twice?

Shadowmask is released in 1.2, was approved on the store just yesterday. I'm working on directional right now Also there will be multiple directional modes, because the one in Unity doesn't always give the desired quality.

Check the updated docs (there is also the same file as PDF in the package): https://docs.google.com/document/d/19ZDUAVJA69YHLMMCzc3FOneTM5IfEGeiLd7P_qYfJ9c/edit#

And it also happens with Unity's own lightmaps as well, right? And only in HDRP? Maybe HDRP bug?

What is written on the progressbar when it happens?
Are you on 1.2? (if you are, there should be shadowmask, for example, and if you move the mouse over the "GPU Lightmapper" label, it should show a tooltip saying it's 1.2). There was one export crash I fixed in the latest version.

 

Hello - just purchased and really excited to try it out.

Visual results so far are very promising and I think this is the right way to go for lightmapping! Ironically, it takes me back 10yrs when games like HalfLife2 had really nice radiosity solutions that even today Unity seems to struggle to match with baked solutions.

Here's a simple test scene (it's about 5x larger than what is seen in opposite direction), it took about 5 minutes to bake! Great! Also, I love how natural the light looks especially with a realistic shadow angle on the sun, so that distant buildings cast softer shadows!






Some feedback below...

Details
Unity 2018.2.5f1
GTX1080Ti
Bakery 1.2

To give some context of the feedback, I'm tasked with assessing whether we can use Bakery as our lighting solution, so I'm bench-marking tools/plugins against questions like:

"We have 20hrs of gameplay content and huge amounts of 3D space to light with a variety of conditions (indoor/outdoor/static/dynamic) and targets (mobile gamma space, PC linear)... with a team of 30 artists, what production ready lighting solutions are available to us?"

I really hope Bakery can be considered, but first there are numerous concerns preventing this from being a 'production ready' and 'hassle free' Lighting plugin. Please take this feedback as constructive, as the lighting results are great, but the tool itself seems very rough and more of an alpha release.


Obsolete API warnings...
`UnityEditor.EditorApplication.playmodeStateChanged' is obsolete: `Use EditorApplication.playModeStateChanged and/or EditorApplication.pauseStateChanged'
`UnityEngine.GL.IssuePluginEvent(int)' is obsolete: `IssuePluginEvent(eventID) is deprecated. Use IssuePluginEvent(callback, eventID) instead.'

Was simple enough to fix... but a heads up that this should be addressed by Bakery. These obselete warnings also means Unity attempts to update Bakery itself.

Flexible Location
Directories are explicitly defining where assets are created/loaded such as 'CreateGlobalStorageAsset()' in ftLightmaps.cs which means if we move this, it means we need to modify your code - every time we update. We have a large project and wish to neatly arrange many 3rd party plugins in our project and not pollute our project root.

Perhaps make this part of a Bakery Preferences? That way teams can configure project wide settings for this plugin. https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/PreferenceItem.html

Related to the above... moving the Bakery files causes this error :
Win32Exception: ApplicationName='../Assets/Editor/x64/Bakery/ies2tex.exe', CommandLine='"/Assets/../Assets/Users/[user]/Bakery/Bakery/examples/content/AreaLight.ies" cookie837993435.dds 1', CurrentDirectory='C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Temp\frender', Native error= The system cannot find the file specified.

I understand this is because it is looking for ies2tex.exe at the explicit location rather than relative location to the plugin... again, an easy fix for the end user is to pollute your root folder with the plugin folders, but this doesn't allow us to organise this plugin with our project.


Additional Steps
- The Bakery light scripts should have option (defaulted) to automap from the Unity light to the Bakery light. The most common artist approach would be to change colour and then rebake, currently the plugin introduces an extra step every single time a parameter is changed which is slow and has huge potential for human error in big production. Consider this on serious environment lighting work - this is not a scalable solution for production.

- Even better, see if you can remove the need for custom scripts on lights at all... almost everything can be derived from the Unity lights (baked shadow angle, direct samples, Mode for indirect or masked), this will make the entire plugin feel like a smooth integration into the already established Unity workflow rather than being a hassle to have to keep matching Unity settings with Bakery components...

Backface GI,
Please correct me if wrong but this seems to be a global setting? Is this not configurable per-material? Perhaps to streamline this with current Unity workflows Bakery could read these details from the shaders meta pass? https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/MetaPass.html

For example, there is different transmission with a bed sheet, plastic tarp and palm fronds, would be fantastic to configure these per-material... as a ShaderParameter so that we don't need to add even more Components


Light Probes
- Light Probe interpolation is broken after a build, it seems Bakery places back probe positions without respecting the hierarchy chain the LightProbeGroup might have been in. See image below where a Parent transform is scaling a Child LightProbeGroup. The Lightprobe Gizmos are rendered in the correct positions (big yellow dots, purple interpolation lines), but the Sphere is interpolating incorrectly as seen by the tetrahedron. This only happens when Bakery bakes LP's, Unity baking is fine.


Color Space
Lighting results seem unusable in Gamma space (super bright... odd artifacts)... I understand Linear is more accurate and gives better results but it means for mobile that Metal is needed if I'm not mistaken? Can Bakery not do its lighting internally in Linear space? Consider projects that want all the amazing subtleties that your lighting algorithm produces, but will be shipping a Gamma space app with no post-effects.

Overall
The visual results are really impressive and the time to bake is fantastic so a big congrats being able to get something like this into Unity!

But currently, this plugin is in no way "Hassle Free" or "Production Ready", please take my comments above as constructive feedback as I really want to integrate this into our pipeline. As it currently stands, there is no way I would risk integrating this into a large production pipeline. I think some serious time/effort into the UI/UX and 'quality of life' of the plugin will do wonders with integrating it into a large production pipeline.


I really want to see this mature as a Production Ready Lighting plugin and I'm happy to keep giving usability feedback as you continue to develop!

Thanks!

 

Seems that Shadowmask doesn't work with Directional. It always displays as Distance Shadowmask. Instead for Point light, it behaves correctly for both Shadowmask and Distance Shadowmask. I will post some screenshot later to better explain the problem.
Above all the new version is a huge improvement! Can't tell you how much I am happy about it
Thank you!

 

This is fine, and will happen because I have to support anything from 5.6 to latest 2018. What is not obsolete in 5.6, is obsolete in 2018, but Unity's auto API updater does a good job to make it work everywhere.
Fun fact: after 2018 auto-updates Bakery, you can't use it anymore even in 2017, because it lacks some newer functions of 2018.
IssuePluginEvent being obsolete is the case on all versions though, and I'll fix it in the future (it's not 100% trivial and there is no functional benefit, so it was always a low priority task).

Even IssuePluginEvent? How? My impression was I need to re-design the DLLs to work with the new non-obsolete mode.

Yeah, I know, was requested by many people. But once again, it's currently a low priority task due to a lack of functional benefit.

Noted - will try to add that.

Not everything at all, unfortunately. Sample count, for example, is important to set per light, and the whole "mixed/realtime/baked" selector is too vague (because mixed can mean both "indirect only" or "shadowmasked").
On top of that there are very specific Bakery lights with very specific settings, like the Skylight and Light Meshes. I really would prefer their settings to be separate and visible. I agree automapping for basic properties would be nice though.

Currently it's global, yes, but I'm considering doing it per-material. It is not yet exactly obvious how. You say metapass, and previously it was suggested to have a separate window with the list of all materials, being able to tweak their Bakery-specific settings there. Technically it's also not completely solved because I will need to store this data somewhere during ray-tracing, instead of it being global.

Nice, but it won't work for standard materials and for various double-sided shaders people download and use without wanting to modify their code.

Hmm hierarchy? Interesting - thanks, I will check that. Sounds like a simple bug.
In the probe rendering function, to init the Lighting Data Asset (which is undocumented and can't be directly modified), I create a single LightProbeGroup, put it in an empty scene and ask Unity to bake it. Then after the asset is created, I can calculate and modify light probe colors manually. It seems like it's just a problem when generating the combined LightProbeGroup.

Most likely it means lightmap hadn't Texture Type set to "Lightmap". It can be selected in Advanced settings for future bakes, and you can switch it on existing lightmap assets.

Yes.

To be honest, there is nothing preventing mobile games from using correct color space apart from Unity not caring. Even when it's not supported by hardware, it's a matter of an easy and cheap shader patch (even without any post effects - just patching normal forward shaders). Other engines do that.
I'm even considering including such a patch with the lightmapper instead of infinitely supporting incorrect gamma rendering that nobody used since 2007 apart from Unity.
And that seems like a pressing matter I'll have to look into soon, since in the Unity world "mobile" means broken color space.

Thanks for honest feedback! I hope it will be more suitable for you after the next release.

 

Directional light? Directional lightmapping? First should work, second is not supported yet.
There is an "example_shadowmask" scene with the new version that has all types of lights (including a directional) with working shadowmask.

 

i had previously commented on unity hanging while bakery was exporting a scene , this was due to RAM being fully used up , i would like to point out that the same things happens with unity's progressive renderer but i was able to solve the problem by increasing the Virtual memory on windows . The process slows down considerably but at least the system was able to complete the task. unfortunately, bakery doesn't seem to consider virtual memory / swap file..

 

It should be managed by the operating system equally for all programs, not much to do from a developer perspective.
How big is the scene? Any terrains there? They can take a while to export, because they are lightmapped at the highest detail level. What is your RAM size?

 

Yes. Every time, on opening a project with Bakery. The only way to stop it is to delete the sponza example, or to not import it to begin with.

 

OK, this is weird. What is your Unity version?

 

This was in 2018.2.5f1

 

Thanks, I'll check. It's possible they changed something in Editor that makes it reimport stuff all the time. I have one project that doesn't reimport Sponza, but it does reimport my character model, like every time, even sometimes during play mode.

 

I'm ussing Gamma space because I've a quite project going on since Unity 4.7. If I switch to linear all the visual tweaks are lost :\ please support unitl is a freaking mess to do so

 

I recognized this scene

from this thread.
To teh autor.
1) Increndible.
2) Smoothe camera move a bit, plus for walking you could use the noise movement script pressent in teh AO from miniengine I posted link few days ago. IT will add very natural camera movement as if walking. Miniature of this video is like a photo, probalby best graphics I've ever seen.
"imposible without bakery" watermark needed

EDIT:
https://github.com/keijiro/MiniEngineAO
find camera scrip in Sponza sample scene

 

Or possible but very slow. Author originally used Enlighten, and this video is likely using its lightmaps.

 

Yes, the example works fine. I should have made something wrong on my side.
Thank you!

 

Hi,
How to make a cancel button working in Bakery window ?
After update to 1.2 bakery stop at "Rendering lightmaps - preparing ..." ?

 

Ahahah you find it!
That video was made by the Sykoo for his youtube channel. If you want to see some video make from me:

I record the movement camera from Vive, and rendered in offline (with Urecord) at 4k at 60 fps.
But thank you for the script, it could be very useful!
Ah, all these videos were still baked with Enlighten, I am preparing an HD SRP baked with Bakery.
And of course, it will be included Bakery logos as it deserves.

Sorry all if I went out of topic!

 

Cancel should work. I have a suspicion that it doesn't always do it correctly during export, but definitely shouldn't be a problem during actual rendering.
It seems like it's not stuck, but is actually preparing something.

 

Nope, pressing cancel hiding window for a sec and window show again and again and again ... only restart editor helps.
Editor is working, only Bakery tab is empty and bakery window is not closeable.

 

Is there any error (a red one) in the console, when you are stuck at preparing?

 

After restarting editor again (5th time) Bakery start working. I'll be testing further.

 

You may want to try to reset editor layout next time ! I think i got the same issue with previous version and i think ( if remember correctly ) i fixed it that way !

 

If I uncheck "export ..." there's an error and Bakery progress window stuck:

Maybe this help:
ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Argument is out of range.
Parameter name: index
System.Collections.Generic.List`1[System.Boolean].get_Item (Int32 index) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Collections.Generic/List.cs:633)
ftRenderLightmap+<RenderLMFinalize>c__Iterator4.MoveNext () (at Assets/Editor/x64/Bakery/scripts/ftRenderLightmap.cs:4428)
ftRenderLightmap+<RenderLightmapFunc>c__Iterator2.MoveNext () (at Assets/Editor/x64/Bakery/scripts/ftRenderLightmap.cs:2706)

 

Probably don't. These checkboxes are the most advanced of all advanced settings, and 90% of the time you want them all enabled.