Feature Request Switching Baked Lightmaps at runtime.

Hello, do you plan to add possibility to change baked lightmaps at runtime?

I have a house with generated lightmaps for day and night scenarios (HDRP) and would like to swap them based on current game time. Without necessity to have two identical scenes.

From what I've been able to find it's possible to achieve that with something like this:

But it's quite cumbersome and with no guarantee it will work long-term.

It would be great to have some official feature. Something like give it a folder with desired light data and it would set everything accordingly on opened scenes.

 

There is an asset called Magic Lightmap Switcher on the Asset Store that can do what you want to achieve.

 

It looks like way to go now.
But still, it will take a lot of effort from developer to keep this asset working long-term. And more assets like this you have the more likely it is that one or more will stop working in the future, let you waiting for some fix, or worse, it will be abandoned.

If the game is going to take many years to develop, you have to be careful and rely more on core Unity stuff. I acknowledge that Asset Store is important revenue stream for Unity (bought hundreds of assets myself). And it's also way to grow community and makes engine much more capable. But at the same time it's much harder and risky going for more complex game and relying on a large amount of third party assets.

So, to sum this up, it would be great if engine could do this by default in the future

 

A built-In tool like the MLS would be great to have in Unity, but in my opinion the possibility that we will get one in the future is almost zero. The main reason is that ray tracing is the future of computer graphics not baked lightmaps.

 

Fair point.
Hope we get something like Lumen in not too distant future.

 

Hey for now you can use realtime GI

 

AFAIK only a relatively small amount of devs' uses Unity with High End, raytracing capable titles as a target. Mobile and low end platforms are still here and they will remain, with their slower performances, for years. So baking is obviously gonna be replaced, but not really "tomorrow".

Even Half Life Alyx has incredibile visuals, but baking is a great part of it

 

While I think raytrasing will become more common in games as time passes, I agree with you, light mapping is not going to go away in the near future. As for mobiles, I do not expect them to get powerful enough to support ray tracing this decade.