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Is my approach to baked lighting wrong?

Discussion in 'General Graphics' started by LazyBird, Apr 19, 2021.

  1. LazyBird

    LazyBird

    Joined:
    Mar 30, 2020
    Posts:
    30
    Hi folks. Working with a very simple scene, which involves some explosives on the floor that the player has to avoid. I want to mildly light these objects to help them pop. Until now I haven't used baked lighting all that much. Lighting these objects with realtime point lights does the trick, and brings me to a total of 5 point lights in the scene. Then, I started playing with converting these lights to baked, to help familiarize myself with baked lighting and also because I've read many posts about the performance benefits of this approach on mobile devices. Since doing this things have become a little tricky and I'm wondering am I doing the right thing here at all.

    I guess my first question is whether my use case is right for baked lighting? In the examples I've seen the baked light is usually a ceiling light or something that helps light an area filled with static objects (which mine is). Am I right to be using baked lighting for a tiny light that literally only illuminates one object or is it intended to be used on a larger scale? I.e, for lights that are illuminating big areas or many objects.

    My next question is (assuming using baked lights for this purpose is correct) am I missing some handy way to speed up the process of making small adjustments to the lights without baking everything again? Do I really have to wait such a long time for a complete re-bake when all I've done is change the intensity of a light from 1.25 to 1.35? With realtime lights I can very easily make these minute property changes and see the changes instantly. When playing with these things you could make 100 changes before you're completely happy. In a baked light context does that mean 100 re-bakes? Something about that feels wrong so I'm assuming my approach is wrong more than anything else.
     
  2. UnityLighting

    UnityLighting

    Joined:
    Mar 31, 2015
    Posts:
    3,866
    Baked lighting and real-time are different. Assuming you make a game for mobile
    Keep in mind that you should completely forget about real-time lighting

    There are two ways to find the correct Bake mode settings:
    1. You have high-end system
    2. You have low-end system

    If you have high-end system (GPU and CPU) you can bake quickly using Progressive GPU and CPU to find proper light settings

    If you have low-end system (like notebooks) you can use Enlighten Baker in very low settings to find proper light settings.

    In both cases you can use Enlighten realtime GI to find quickly light settings and bake finally the result

     
    LazyBird and Opeth001 like this.