Lightmapping Extended - advanced lightmapping settings editor

Someone noticed that "LOD Surface Distance" dont work with Lightmaping extended loaded in the project? Its an esential setting form me.

 

Hey all, sorry for the radio silence, I had stopped receiving thread update notifications.

I've created a new branch in the LM Extended GitHub repository that includes preliminary support for Unity 5. The tool appears to work as expected when the lightmapping GI workflow is set to "legacy", but it ignores all of Unity 5's new features such as IBL skyboxes and physically correct shading.

Since legacy lightmapping has been strongly partitioned off from the rest of Unity's new rendering pipeline, this is the end of the road for development of LM Extended. I'll keep an eye on Unity's new Enlighten lightmapping system, and if there's an opportunity to unlock additional features then there will most certainly be a LM Extended v2 in the future.

 

@mstevenson: Looking forward to it!

 

Awesome! I am looking forward to it too!

 

Watching

 

Hi, I'm currently using Monte Carlo alone to render a 1 bedroom apartment at a resolution of 150 and 2500 rays, looks as if it'll be about a 48 hour render time. Will post pics once I'm done.

 

Okay, finished. Not impressed with the quality for the time taken, for this static scene I'd much rather use manual V-Ray lightmaps as it's about 36 hours quicker and produces better results. For a dynamic scene I'd definitely use Monte Carlo again, posssibly coupled with Final gather for more pronounced ambient occlusion.

 

Hello there guys! I'm actually using Final gather for lightmapping indoor scenes, and I'm having some troubles with shadows & occlusion.
It doesn't seem to be shadowing effect what I'm getting on this scene, it seems more like dirt on the walls, how can I fix that up? It also includes artifacts on the top of the ceiling as you may see.





This didn't happen when using Beast LM.
And this is the settings I've used for it:

Thank's beforehand!

 

Today I discovered that is not possible to lightmap by selecting groups of elements and that you need to bake all teh stuff at once because the lightmaps do get overwriten. This is really crazy s*it but looking on the forums seems that it is the way is supossed to be. It would be awesome if there was an option to bake the the lightmaps in additive mode rather than destroy the existing ones, even if this could mean wasting lighmaps texture space would be more practical to handle big scenes.

 

WHell reading further I see more people complaining of this and others confirming this catastrofic issue. Who the hell in Unity thought that users would just need to bake ALL the stuff in the scene at once, with same settings?. I've a big scene and what to bake the stuff by parts, some with dual lightmaps in high res, others with single in mid low res etc and this is only achiveable with teh bake selected that crazily crushes previous bakings. Aaaaah the classic unity booby trap. mstevenson, anychances to extend your asset to solve this?.

 

How to bake scene by parts:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/release-beast-helper-dont-lose-old-maps-anymore.62095/

 

Hi guys! Does anyone still use Lightmapping Extended for Unity? It was released in 2013, and I remember that it was a great solution - in fact much better than default lightmapping in Unity. But LE hasn't beed updated since then, and I'm wondering if default lightmapping in Unity 5.x is better, or if LE is still better solution? Thank you!

 

The Unity 5 Enlighten lightmapping system is generally more flexible given its real-time GI features, but I've found that its static lighting doesn't look as good as Beast. It's also much slower to compute, and fails completely in some cases such as in scenes that include large open areas.

My currently solution is to bake maps in Maya using Turtle and manually set them up in Unity using a custom shader. Turtle is based on the same rendering tech as Beast so its settings will be very familiar.