Lightmapping in Unity 5 simply not as good as Beast?

I've been using Unity 5 for a while now, and the baked lightmap quality seems to be far inferior to Beast. There are the little things, such as ambient occlusion getting wiped out when a light shines on it, but my issue is it just seems lower quality in general.

 

I'm having the same issue, I hope that some next update will fix this.

 

I'm not sure it's updatable. I think they just work in fundamentally different ways. Beast seems better quality to me.

 

imo Unity team had to re-invent the wheel because of realtime GI thingie. There are lots of outstanding not solved issues. Especially on mobile
so brace yourself and go to read how great Unity 5 is on the blogs and watch amazing keynotes and Unite events to see how things could be if worked

 

It is unworkable for large scenes with many objects

 

Beast was a tool focused very specifically on offline baking of high quality lightmaps.

It's been replaced by a system that can do some very clever real-time stuff (on suitably high-end hardware), but it does rather feel that regular diffuse-only lightmaps were an afterthought.

It's a shame they didn't keep Beast integrated. Upgrading a lightmap-heavy project (lots of lightmapped levels, each with possibly hundreds of lights) from 4.x to 5.x doesn't currently sound like it's very practical right now?

 

yep, new lightmapping is pretty much useless for me- I've gone back to the good old days of pre-lighting and baking my lightmaps in v-ray. good times :|

Alternatively, if you still have unity 4 installed- you could bake your lightmaps there and just copy them over into Unity 5, as long as you don't change the UV2 for the meshes you should be good to go.

 

That's exactly what should happen. Applying AO to direct lighting has always been wrong.

 

It's "wrong" but it's the effect all games use. The "right" way doesn't look as good.

Right now we're stuck using an image effect which destroys FPS.