Migrating 4.6 Beast Lightmaps to 5.2

My game heavily used Beast lightmaps on Unity 4.6.
Since Beast is no longer available on 5.2. Does anyone has an upgrade guide to the new Unity lightmaps?

thanks

 

I don't have a guide, but I did experiments with a good amount of success.

What were you using in 4.6? Single Lightmaps?

 

Yes, Single Lightmaps

 

You want to use Legacy shaders (or whatever other custom shaders you were using), switch everything to baked only and use final gather (1024 should be a decent starting point, but you might need more) with a baked res similar (or slightly less) to what you had in 4.6. Turn realtime GI off altogether.

One minor issue is that the legacy Self-Illumination shaders don't have an intensity value in 5.2, so that may be a problem if you were using a lot of emmisive materials. I was told it's an oversight and it will be fixed soon.

Indirect intensity and bounce boost are similar in theory with what you had in beast, but the look is different (different engine) so you might need different values than what you had.

There is also no bounce control, that may or may not be a problem.

 

How do you go about keeping the lightmap UV's the same going between the two unity versions?

 

If you're using lightprobes with your lightmaps, expect pain in 5.x.

They've been broken since 5.0 launched (apparently fixed recently, no idea when the fix will make it into a release) but also, the 'bake probes' button is gone. The only way to rebake probes is via a full lightmap rebake. Ouch.

Really hoping that we'll see 4.x support extended a bit longer... Moving to 5 is a problematic/backwards step for some mobile projects with a whole lot of baked lighting. 4.x still seems the better option if you just need 'old fasioned' lightmaps+probes and all the shiny new high-spec stuff is irrelevant to you

 

You don't really. You can't use the same lightmaps that you used in beast, so you have to rebake and the new algorithm will pack differently. It also moves the islands and stretches some uvs so that things are not smaller than 1 pixel (which is generally really good, really small details are better lightmapped now)

 

Doh - i got all excited about using beast and not enlighten - its so S***ty

Someone really needs to write a unity 5 plugin to bypass enlighten and bake using beast. Would make them a ton of cash :/

 

It's not that bad. I had that impression too, but once I actually attempted to match my Beast single lightmaps with Enlighten's FInal Gather, I was quite happy with the results.