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Trying to work out our lightmapping pipeline

Discussion in 'General Graphics' started by marshmatter, Dec 28, 2015.

  1. marshmatter

    marshmatter

    Joined:
    Oct 2, 2013
    Posts:
    46
    I'm looking for some ideas in how I can approach our Unity 5 lightmapping pipeline for a mobile (Android/iOS) title. I've found lots of little caveats for colour spaces and lightmapping for Unity Cloud builds that have created some issues.

    The first issue: Enlighten bakes in linear space, but Android and iOS work in gamma space. Meaning: working with lights in gamma space does not create an accurate preview of the Enlighten bake. I could work entirely in Linear space within the editor, but the results on the actual device would not be accurate because...

    The second issue: for Unity Cloud builds, the lightmaps have to be manually baked. This is fine, but the repo size is going to quickly spiral out of control with revisions to lighting and fresh bakes being done. Inevitably, this is going to happen a lot.

    So, the two issues create a bit of a paradox:

    I can work entirely in linear space, but the actual device build won't have accurate lighting until the bakes are done. This makes the on-device build very limited for testing. Dynamic lights won't be accurate since they would be converted to gamma space.

    OR

    I can do frequent (daily?) manual bakes for accurate colour on the device itself, but the lightmaps will balloon the repo size. I've noticed we've already passed the 1tb mark since I started working with lightmaps.

    Some questions:

    Have I mis-interpreted anything here about colour spaces or Enlighten's baking?

    Is there a better way to handle lightmaps within Unity Cloud or the repo (Git via Bitbucket)?

    I'm going to start to looking around Unity Decompiled, but is there a way to force different colour spaces in the editor regardless of the device target so I can quickly switch back and forth when I'm doing lighting passes?