Official Progressive CPU Lightmapper

Are there plans to implement the Lock Atlas feature for the Progressive Lightmapper? It may well be the last piece of the puzzle which would allow use PLM in our projects.

 

I have a very large scene in which I was hoping to use the new PLM because it gives such great results (especially for night time outdoor scenes) but when I try to bake my scene in it's entirety i get the following message:

"Progressive lightmapper supports a maximum of 10000 instances. Please remove some instances and try rebaking the scene."

Am I bound to having less than 10,000 objects in one bake? Is this temporary or by design? Anyone have any good work arounds? I am currently attempting to bake separately and load in baked scenes but I would rather not have to keep everything separated so.

 

Unable to do it. Looks a restrict service.

 

Anyone else using the progressive lightmapper getting giant black pixelated blotches, even after hours of baking?

 

used to happen with area lights, did you check backface tolerance? UVs?

 

Finally got around to trying this last night and was impressed by how much better the interior shadows look compared to Enlighten. I'm running Unity 5.6.3p1 on a decent rig with 32GB of RAM and have had quite a few problems and crashes just trying to get things to work at all... but when they do, is looking really nice.

Things I've encountered, already noted looking back through this thread:

• Increasing 'Lightmap Resolution' beyond 20 texels causes instability and crashes sometimes when baking.
• Increasing the 'Lightmap Size' beyond 1024 causes all kinds of problems, and memory issues.
• Area lights are pretty messed up and cause weird squares / anomalies on objects.
• Bake times seem inconsistent, first attempt was 4 hours, another said 7 hours and then 2... for the same settings.
• Getting out of memory issues at console occasionally but the bakes continues, will the system keep retrying these failures until successful (if the bake is continuing to run and update)?

Overall looks pretty exciting... will future updates continue to be included in 5.6 as well? 2017 is still not performing well on my project compared to 5.6.

 

So once the progressive % has gone to 100%, the status message changes to 'Baking...' and the editor still shows a high % of CPU usage. It's been like this for one hour now. Is this behavior expected, or we're in glitch-ville now?

Previous bake I did with different settings overnight... so I have no idea if that was the same.

 

Will GPU support also be in 5.6? or will that be pushed to the new releases?

 

So yeah -- it stayed like that for about 3 hours and then crashed.

 

Am baking at a Lightmap Resolution of only 10 and 1024 Lightmap Size.

 

Thanks for reply -- it was baking 7 maps @ 1024 for my scene and barfing after completion. I tried a few different settings, cleaning all caches etc. but nothing seemed to help.

I've gone back to Enlighten for the time being, but look forward to trying a more stable version of the new light mapper soon... as I'm sure it will be awesome once ready!

 

Unity 5.6.3p1 - not sure about log... I gave up when I felt like throwing my computer out the window yesterday. I'll perhaps try again at the weekend and get a log... or will try 2017 again, or maybe just wait a bit until you guys have the newer features rolled out, as my free time is kind of limited right now.

BTW - I saw your tweet yesterday about baking a stack of light maps.. nice work there!

 

Is there an eta on support for Distance ShadowMasks/Subtractive, etc? The lack of these is still killing my project. (Not to mention the out-of-memory on any sensible size level, but it seems you're addressing that one!)

 

Same question !?

Thank You !

 

YES!

 

Oh, so THAT'S what 'very soon' means.

"the awesome new lightmodes that we added in 5.6 are not supported yet in the progressive lightmapper, but they will be very soon."

Jesper-Mortensen, Feb 23, 2017

 

It's ok, we love you really

 

How on earth is it possible that this is the third (or fourth??) lightmapping solution and I still cannot bake an outdoor scene with terrain + trees and have the trees cast proper shadows. This has been broken since at least Unity 4. It blows my mind.

 

There is a limit in baked lights number?
In a test I have made seems that after a certain number of lights they are ignored in the baked lightmap.
It's a bug or a limitation ?

 

Thank you for your quick reply.
Can't wait for the fix. Thank you!

 

Did you improve the memory management has well in 1017.3 because it is really bad currently can't use the system in 2017.2 my system always run out of memory before Unity Crash

 

Is there any way to fix mixed mode lighting becoming broken once I've set the lightmapper to "Progressive" and then switched back to "Enlighten". It's like the editor is stuck on Progressive lightmapping. Editor is 5.6

 

I see that in Unity 2017.3 the Progressive Lightmapper support Shadowmask... AWESOME.
But seems that the FILTERING doesn't work anymore.
Hope in a quick fix

 

Filtering? As in antialiasing bakes?

 

*holds breath for the 5.6 release*

 

Hope you have Olympic breath-holding technique.

But seriously, yeah would be really nice for these updates to come back to 5.6 soon.

 

I was talking about the Filtering of the Progressive lightmap.
Both "Auto" and "Advance" options doesn't work in Unity 2017.3.

 

I correct myself.
Filtering, in Lightmap Settings/Progressive works only after bake is finished.
Before 2017.3 Filtering works also during iterations.
Is it intended or it's a bug ?

 

Does the current 2017.3 progressive lightmapper support >10000 objects? Almost tempting enough to upgrade my project from 5.6 for that.

 

So curious to hear what improved and what regressed with the Progressive Lightmapper in the new 2017.2 release?

 

I was under the impression you should use lighting probes for small things, and only light map larger things/things with obvious shadow seams?

Also; really would love an ETA on the 5.6 backport >_<

 

+1 for the 5.6 backporting on Mixed Mode lighting fix too.

 

I am having the same issue. Changing 'Backface Tolerance' to 1 inside Lightmap Parameters does not help resolve the issue, nor did enabling Double Sided Global Illumination in material settings. I'm baking light with 40 resolution, 320 direct and 500 indirect samples, 2048 lightmap size. I'm using Unity 5.6.3. Here are my observations:

What I did notice, was the fact that those black squares disappear from view if I move my editor camera away from an affected mesh. They actually smoothly fade out in opacity as I move my camera away, to the point they vanish completely. This is both visible in Shaded view and Baked Lightmap view, so the black squares seem to be a weird part of lightmaps, like a layer on top of them.

The black squares have a white, strongly emissive border (as in Polff's images) when the lightmaps are directional. In non-directional mode, they are just black.
They don't appear in light bakes that use a small number of Direct and Indirect Samples.

Moreover, this whole issue seems to happen in scenes with Area Lights that are intersecting with and/or are very close to static geometry. In a scene with only one light source (Area Light), I moved the Area Light away from wall, leaving a clearly visible gap, and the black squares stopped appearing in the bake! Once I moved it back closer to the wall, they begun popping up again.

I hope this helps identify and fix this pesky bug once and for all.
Progressive Lightmapper is a huge improvement over Enlighten, and has a great future. If it wasn't for this bug and the 'lights randomly switching off', it would be perfect for my use cases. Thanks for the hard work Unity team! The future looks bright

 

I've also had this problem related to Area Lights creating splotches. So I had to disable them in order to get rid of the super-brightnes created by these artifacts. However, I tried your hypothesis of moving them away from any static geometry and now it works just fine. I moved my Area Lights about 0.5 units away from the windows in the scene! Thanks for the tip