Baking directional lightmaps with Blender Cycles

Hello,

We all know that Enlighten is utter dog S*** at baking static lightmaps.

If you want lightmaps that look good, then your only options is to use an external rendered like Vray or Blender Cycles. The problem is that you can't bake directional lightmaps with Blender Cycles or Vray.

So I took a stab at creating lights that attempt to do just that with Cycles. Here is my node setup:



This node setup sends different colored rays depending on direction from light source.

The only problem here is that Unity directional lightmaps appear to be bound to a 8-bit per channel texture with every colour representing one direction. I have not been able to clamp these values, and they often go above a brightness of 1.0. Also there is some crosstalk between light rays that can change the direction of the light. This can be mitigated by manipulating the bounce light levels.

The potential benefits if someone has any idea on how to make this work, are a drastic reduction if light acne and pixel errors that are produced regardless of how many hours you bake with Enlighten.

 

Hey. Do you worked further on this?

 

I recommend you use this: https://forum.unity.com/threads/bakery-gpu-lightmapper-v1-6-released.536008/