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Unity's Enlighten - baked lighting a big step backward from Beast.

Discussion in 'Global Illumination' started by Mahoney014, Jul 23, 2015.

  1. creatlore

    creatlore

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    Thanks for the response back AcidArrow
     
  2. SilverStorm

    SilverStorm

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    Your comment was cut off, did you mean to say something else?

    Also to expand further, instead of selective baking I was trying to explain regional baking.
    So when you re-render the lightmap the only calculations being done are the area that small change would affect. This would save a lot of calculation time and if the program doesn't know what it will affect then you can define it with a little box similar to the way mesh bounds currently work in the mesh renderer tab or custom colliders would.
     
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  3. KEngelstoft

    KEngelstoft

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    Hi! In 5.4 we have added an option for applying AO on direct lighting too, like Beast did in 4.x. This is something you have to enable as an artistic choice, because it is not physically correct.
    ao.png
    As for the bake times, follow the advice given here on how to set resolution and set up UVs for your scene. It will speed up both lightmap baking and realtime GI precompute. http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/11/05/awesome-realtime-gi-on-desktops-and-consoles/
     
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  4. creatlore

    creatlore

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    I was meaning to say something else, but not sure why it cut off the rest of the question. I am having a new issue now where the baking process seems to be getting hung up at 12/16 Bake Indirect 1 jobs and wont finish. I tried clearing out the GI cache under preference and rebaking, also deleting our library folder so Unity could build a fresh one when I restart Unity but nothing seems to be working. Have you or anyone else experienced this problem before?

    At this point I might try reverting Unity back to 5.2.3p3 because the same scene Ive been working out of and successfully baking lightmaps before it worked fine in that version. Hope that works and fixes my problem, fingers crossed. Weird thing is though is I was able to bake this scene out once already perfectly fine in 5.3 but for whatever reason now its not working all of a sudden.
     
    Last edited: Dec 17, 2015
  5. SilverStorm

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    Yeah I can't really offer any advice, I don't even bother with Unity 5s GI anymore, it spun our team round with a headache so they moved to Unreal. I only use the Precomputed GI at default settings, I never touch baked GI as I can never get it to work and when I do the results look really bad and takes way too long to bake.

    If scaling your scene down by 10 x does not work then I can't give you any other solutions.
    Enlightens GI is Unit Scale sensitive, this means the larger your scene not by scale but by physical units then the longer it takes to bake, why it does this I have no idea and they still haven't fixed this issue yet.
     
  6. AcidArrow

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    I hate to be that guy, but AO as a whole is not "physically correct".

    It's the faki-est effect ever.

    Corner shadows and contact shadows should (or should not) occur naturally from a decent lightmapper and no one should have to add AO on top just to ground things.

    I guess my point is that applying AO to direct is just "more wrong", but there is nothing physically correct to the effect in general anyway.
     
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  7. SilverStorm

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    That was what he was implying. The whole notion of realism is not the point, it is to make a all elements of the visuals fit in like they belong together, this should be the aim. Realism should not be.

    The direct AO is Unities attempt to calm the Beast Lightmapper fans from Unity4.
     
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  8. AcidArrow

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    Beast fans liked beast because it produces nice high density lightmaps at decent speeds not because of its AO capabilities.
     
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  9. SilverStorm

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    I need to cool down....the more I spend time in these forums the more I am beginning to go full hate speech on this engine.
     
    Last edited: Dec 18, 2015
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  10. Vexar

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    I need things to look as good as they can for the hardware to work with out crashing, and be as fast as possible.

    Unity 5 is a step back in every way. I am not fanboy of Unity 4 because I think it has better lighting it worked and didn't crash as often and took less time to do the same job.

    The circle jerk of perfect lighting when most people are doing games for touch screen devices that don't even support advanced rendering feature is just that a circle jerk.

    After using 5 for this past six weeks my feeling is that it is to be avoided for any future projects, and make every attempt to keep people on 4 for as long as possible.

    With the current hardware capabilities it is the smartest thing I can do for my clients. They get more value because I don't have to fix things that were not broken in 4 faster-better-cheaper.

    My advice to the Unity developers is to make the hard decisions internally, get your act together, and make sure your engine works as well as 4 did even if you dump Enlighten and roll your own that you can control.

    My trust in Unity as a engine development team has been reduced through this experience using 5.
     
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  11. bluescrn

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    The baked AO was a nice feature, and a contributing factor to the nice results you could get from Beast. Even if not physically correct, it's an artistic choice, it can add a bit of contrast and help make a scene look more solid

    It's approaching a year on from the release of 5.x and it seems pretty clear that the 5.x 'Enlighten Experiment' has been a significant step backwards in lighting functionality for a lot of users - whether you just want simple baked lighting+lightprobes for mobile, or a mixed baked+real-time shadows on higher-end.

    It's a shame that Beast wasn't kept around as a a 'legacy lighting' option, as it was in the 5.0 beta.

    I'm working on a (mobile) project where those on the team who have had anything to do with lighting are dreading the prospect of moving to 5.x (even if it's bug-free and as stable as 4.x) - because it means rebaking (and probably re-setting-up) the lighting for a lot of scenes, and in 5.x lightprobes can no longer be baked separately from the lightmaps (for example, with a different set of lights). A lot of work with a less flexible, less stable, and slower workflow, for results that are likely to be inferior.

    But there's not a lot of competition in the 'mobile-friendly game engine' market. Unity does a lot of things very well, but baked lighting is kind of critical to 3D games on mobile, you can't just rely on 'real-time per-pixel everything' as you can on high-end platforms.

    Maybe somebody could build a tool to allow us to use Unity 4.6.x as a light baking system for Unity 5.x projects?...
     
    Last edited: Dec 18, 2015
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  12. JamesArndt

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    I'm feeling this pain today too. Taking forever to bake with this Enlighten stuff. Beast was always beautiful and consistent in what I had to do to get best results. I'm sticking to 4.6 with Skyshop on a few projects.
     
  13. SilverStorm

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    The decision to drop 4 support confused me a lot.

    Unity5 personal now offers enhanced shadows and shaders.
    Unity4 Pro which requires payment in order to use, has inferior shadows and shaders.
    Keep in mind Unity4 support has now been dropped too.

    The system they had, worked, the situation has gotten so bad that every new Unity5 update, despite having been tested by them and by their beta team - always yields game breaking bugs that we the consumer are forced to deal with. I am actually afraid to test newer Unity versions.

    Anyway I know they are listening, this is why 5.4 has the ability to bake AO even if the scene is lit directly now. But Unity5 AO is useless and enabling the option alone increases baking time dramatically with inferior results and with the bugs in place, testing it out would be very expensive and take far too long in bake times to make use of it.
     
    Last edited: Dec 19, 2015
  14. JamesArndt

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    Yeah I'm pretty confused with this as well. I've seen better performance on mobile across the board with 4.6 version of Unity.
     
  15. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    The best way to fix it is supply a test to unity which authoritatively shows the regression in performance. Because for me, its overall faster across the board. I think we are doing different things? I did roll all my own shaders. If anyone's using standard for mobile - don't. Same for default skybox.
     
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  16. JamesArndt

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    Yeah I guess that's the hitch then. I spoke with the Unity reps down here at a developer conference in Orlando and they said that the Standard shader performance on mobile was great, no issues...so I started to use it on projects for mobile. It's definitely not as performant as my vertex colored shaders from 4.6, but I guess it was naive of me to believe the reps statements.
     
  17. hippocoder

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    Whoever you spoke to probably isn't in the field doing real games. They're wrong, regardless if they work for unity or not.

    You don't use standard on mobile hw. They don't have either the bandwidth or ALU to remotely cope. It's one thing to do a few tests, and quite another to pressure with a game. I can't see standard in it's current form being useful....

    I would recommend blending probes (basic IBL) for a mobile variant that can get quite close - IBL is half the battle :)
     
  18. SilverStorm

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    It's more than just a speed issue. The bottom line is it seems we can't do a damn thing about it and it won't benefit the consumer or Unity in the long run.

    Unity is trying to dabble in a market it has no chance in, and believe me, after a couple weeks convincing my team to use Unity over Unreal - they couldn't get it figured out - especially the GI and everything they made looked really bad in comparison to Unreal so they just went back because it ended up being way more technical than it needed to be.

    I gotta agree with them, too many steps to take, which ultimately result in inferior quality. The GI is completey useless in SVN anyway since the library folder is not shared, forcing them to rebuild lighting every time a major update is done.
     
  19. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    What market is that?
     
  20. SilverStorm

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    The high end market. That was the entire point of bringing in Enlighten.
    They ARE the best in the mobile to mid and their is a strong market for that. Why they decided to just close the doors makes no sense.
     
    Last edited: Dec 19, 2015
  21. JamesArndt

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    Yeah it definitely feels like they are shutting the doors on their strength in mobile development. Why create a new universal shader in Unity that doesn't work well on mobile?

    Don't even get me started on Enlighten...this is garbage compared to the robustness and speed of Beast lightmapping.
     
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  22. Vexar

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    Just had a bug reported to me that my entire terrain was gone, looks like using AO, LM generated using Unity on PC produced .exr that are not working with the Mac Unity 5 client. Clearing the baked data, and reloading the scene fixed it, now they have to bake the Light maps on slower machines, and hope they work.

    I am just as confused as ever how this lighting system has survived. I was on the border of rebuilding the entire project under Unity 4 for a few days just to avoid this mess.

    I downloaded a fresh copy of 4.7 and burned it to a bluray disk then placed it in a safety deposit box so I can always have it just in case every machine I own dies in a fire.
     
  23. robert-nally

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    Thank you for starting this thread and for taking the time. I couldn't agree more with what you wrote. Everyday that I have to deal with Enlighten or look at my Beast results I get frustrated and lament the change in lighting engines in Unity. I appreciate you writing without cursing or using overly negative words as well because every time I deal with Enlighten my blood boils and I would not be able to maintain as much composure describing this issue as you have.

    Has anyone had good results baking outside of Unity and would care to share their workflow or results?

    I am also ready to make the switch to bake outside of Unity. My bake times generally range from 6 - 10 hours even on the lowest possible settings and with a pretty decent PC. I'm also trying to work through re-baking my maps thanks to Unity 5.3. I'll try and put the details in another thread by I'm getting errors all over the place in regards to lighting.

    I also checked the roadmap to see what the horizon looked like for fixes in the future. I don't think distributed baking is going to be the solution nor will partial scene baking although I am hopeful they will.

    I appreciate Unity's developers working to bring in new features and improve the program as another person pointed out, but Enlighten should have stayed in a beta state for another year or two from the looks of it.
     
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  24. AcidArrow

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    And why do they have no chance?

    (I mean, I have my issues with enlighten as well, but the Deferred/Linear/Realtime lights workflow is the only one that has a decent workflow with enlighten right now and is the "high end" one)
     
  25. AaronC

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    Unitys implementation of Enlighten is nothing but a f*cking joke.
     
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  26. SilverStorm

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    1.Because everything within Unity requires workarounds-they just don't work out of the box.
    Introduced feature are usually broken and missing key features.

    2.They as a company make breaking decisions without involving its users such as the addition of Enlighten and the changes from Unity 4.6 to 4.9 - there's barely anything new within it. They just wanted to get to 4.9 faster to announce that they are dropping it - a big F U to all of us.
    Even the new changes made to Mecanim since 5.0 aren't in 4 despite an update for 4.9 being just released this month.

    3.They appear with features whenever they feel like it and often ignore voted and needed ones in favor of useless ones such as the recent mesh particle addition. Take a look at nested prefabs for example, they have a lot of votes on that and just choose to ignore it or say we are working on it like they have the last 5 years.

    4.They release bug filled and untested content. It is now a trend to see bugs as "expected" today and this is because they know they can half ass it and patch it up later because they think people will accept it. This same trend applies to video games nowadays. This was never how it used to be. It's no wonder nobody wants to pay for the engine.

    This is what has happened with enlighten; you are forced to go to older versions of Unity but you have to pay for Unity 4 Pro to get anything close to 5 and it's still missing key features and support ended for it and new asset store content prefers 5. Grabbed by the balls man....

    5.It uses an inaccurate non-truncated floating point system which forces values like 0.3483948-e making accurate level design impossible. Gaps are caused when snapping as well. It's a nightmare and it's missing basic tools like Symmetry and so on.

    6.Its Character Controller support is really bad and hasn't been updated in years causing you to make a fusion of rigidbodies and scripted workarounds.

    7.Its Asset store is full of half assed content that instead of fixing things breaks them.
    Even their own content is bugged and gets poor ratings.

    8.As an SVN tool, don't even bother. At its current state theirs a bug requiring lighting to be re-calculated every SVN commit....good luck with that using 5.

    9. Its prefab system is completely broken, causing failed updates especially when instances are broken and replacing an instance requires re-assigning all missing references and reactivating all original settings especially if your game object is an avatar with 10 heads etc.

    Now I could go on with things such as its Terrain system (where the hell is dynamic tessellation), bad shadows, beast is gone, Unit setup messed up, import settings wtf, memory leaks and crap GUI system....the list is deep.

    Unity uses false advertising. A great example is the Black Smith demo. But take a look at the asset store and you will see most of that demo contains their own custom solution to characters, shaders and even their own shadow and atmospheric scattering solution which is how they make their content look so good. Users think good looking content is attributed to the engine that made it out of the box, but it's not, it rarely is with Unity which will lead them to spend money on post fx and plugins. It's a cruel never ending cycle designed to bleed us dry.

    So to answer your question those were some of the things it needs to change before it's ready.
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2015
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  27. bluescrn

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    I've been wondering about the possibility of using Unity 4.x purely as a lightmap baking tool for 5.x projects... not sure how feasible it is, I don't know enough yet about how the internals are handled - do we have enough control to apply externally-baked lightmaps to objects in a Unity-friendly way? (e.g. lightmap UVs, position/scale of objects in a lightmap, lightmap texture index)

    Unity was unable to import 4.x lightmaps intact into 5.x, so I'm guessing there's likely to be something that we have no control over... But worst-case, you could use your own multitextured shaders, and generate lots of material instances as needed - but that could result in a rather messy workflow...
     
  28. SilverStorm

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    I am also interested in this, I tried looking for a way but it seemed very complicated. I heard they were able to get it working but they had to edit some internal files. But yes, so far I don't know of a way to be able to use a lightmap within Unity without putting it in the necessary slot of a shader, thus causing extra calls. If anyone knows a way, let us know.
     
  29. Stardog

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    You can just bake light into the textures the old fashioned way, if you're desperate.
     
  30. sisermann

    sisermann

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    SilverStorm that is a spot on analysis ... I agree 100%.

    I did not know that the snapping issue is related to the floating point system ... but good to know this was
    driving me mad ...

    The Blacksmith Demo was a joke I agree ... this is not a real world project ... more a 4 Cylinder Volkswagen turbocharged to 600 HP. It is possible ... yes ... but is it practical or sustainable ... no.
     
  31. tryptic

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    Add me to the chorus, I've wasted so much time trying to get good results from Enlighten GI, only to have to make the hard decision to abandon it. I understand why Beast was dropped, Autodesk owns it, made Stingray, and doesn't want a competing engine using their tech. But then for Unity to replace it with a solution that doesn't scale, and wasn't tested in true production environments is, to put it mildly, astonishing. I was so excited about the potential of this, but that has since turned to frustration & disappointment. The ball has been dropped.
     
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  32. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Well I can say I would definitely not be using Unity today if 5 had not come out. While it is still flawed, it is enough for my game.
     
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  33. AcidArrow

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    I have the following to add to this thread:

    1. Yes, enlighten has a ton of problems. I am with you all. I also believe Unity is painfully aware of this and they are doing their best. If that is enough or not remains to be seen.

    2. Lightmapping aside everything else in Unity 5 looks to be better than 4.x. Yes 5.x.0 releases are buggy, but they were in 4.x as well. Actually I believe 4.x got to a decent state after 4.3. People may forget because we've been "stuck" with 4.5/.6 for ages which only had incremental changes. 3.x had the same problems.

    3. I love beast as well. It was THE reason I chose Unity vs UDK (at the time). I don't have any insider info but... Beast was created by illuminate labs. Unity licensed the tech from them. They had DistriBeast and eRnsT under development, and I assumed at the time we would see them in Unity as well (they are tech for distributed rendering and real time preview (kinda like what is coming for enlighten!)).

    Illuminate labs was soon bought by Autodesk. Beast in Unity never received significant updates in its lifetime. Autodesk released their own engine that includes beast.

    All I'm saying is that things may be more complicated and there may be more than one reasons for why Beast is no longer included in Unity.
     
  34. SilverStorm

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    I remember an employee saying Beast was not able to handle PBR. Beast would disable normal, specular and any fancy effects on your shaders once it was baked in but the performance gains were amazing. This was great for static objects and low-mid end builds.

    Light probes, dual rendering and normal map baking were added and beast worked with real time lighting quite easily too by adding a real time light into the mix but those special details would only be seen when the light was shun on objects.

    Seriously though, did anyone actually want that particle update they made, because theirs so many better features available such as dynamic tessellation, nested prefabs, a better lighting system, firing some Unity staff hahaha. It appears Unity is putting the cart before the horse.
     
  35. AcidArrow

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    Considering the lightmapping has very little to do with pbr, I don't think any of that is correct.

    In any case my whole point is they didn't change from beast to enlighten for laughs and giggles.
     
  36. QuantumTheory

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    Has there been any official word on the state of Enlighten and what the plan is? Any clue at all? I haven't seen anything since 5.0 was released.
     
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  37. AcidArrow

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    They plan on doing bug fixes (I mean there are already a lot of bug fixes in 5.3, not enough IMHO). And when they are done they can start bring more features. Expectations are kinda high for 5.4.

    Distributed rendering and progressive lightmap baking (based on powervr tech) are also coming. Something about improving final gather. Implementing new enlighten features (like transparency).

    They are pretty vague about timeframes for these. My guess is it's because they also depend on Geomerics doing stuff for them, so they can never be confident enough to put something concretely on the roadmap (too many moving parts).
     
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  38. JamesArndt

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    One of the very big advantages of Unity over Unreal and just a major selling point for itself was it's ability to run the editor on mid range and older hardware. It was always very quick for builds, to bake lighting in Beast. Today, I can no longer make quick builds with this Enlighten issue....or for some reason, scenes I haven't touched in my project need lighting completely rebaked and hold up my build sequence (I've not re-exported models with UV changes or anything). When will this Enlighten system become as fast as Beast was (for people working on older hardware)?
     
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  39. SilverStorm

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    I also want to add that the 64 Bit editor is now quite bloated with it running a a few more processes than its 32Bit counterpart. I can see several conhosts as well as a 32 bit shader compiler and a 64 bit one in task manager.

    Right now I have designed a solution to avoid the annoying broken prefabs issue. Despite me having to use Physics and Ragdolls on my models, I am forced to come up with weird workarounds such as using a script to search by name and auto-assign stuff using an ExecuteInEdit mode or some other crazy stuff. It really is crazy when you think about it, the lengths someone has to go to, to simply get basic functionality seen in other engines because after their was a disconnect from my .max file in the project hierarchy, I made some minor changes to the skinning in Max and saved.

    I also am having an issue where a script on my character controller keeps glitching out adding more than one 1 fruit number to my counter because ontrigger enter sends it to all triggers, even ones that are on my character in other places that specifically were told by tag not to include, ahh the issues are endless.

    Fun Fact: Did you guys know that if you use Update rather than FixedUpdate, that you open your game up to potential bugs being driven by different performance indicators because Update is not called consistently where as FixedUpdate is always consistent?? Update is also responsible for some screen tearing because it is called more than once per frame!

    Alright now I am just trolling lol.
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2016
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  40. idurvesh

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  41. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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    I wish creating UVs for lightmapping was a little straight forward... as well as setting up the lightmap tools for baking. I remember writing tutorials for Beast and it was EXTREMELY easy to use... I was able to create believable lighting in relatively short time... I also don't like that I have to work around the skybox ambient light being global... (if there is a way to get around this, I would love to hear about it)

    I also miss Lock Atlas and being about to use the sky to generate the light like in reality... (I was trying to create the effect of light from outside coming into a room... damn hard to do with enlighten unless you use a sphere with a sky mapped to and setting it to static)

    And the biggest bother for me, is that even with some high settings the lighting is SPLOTCHY! Come on, now...
     
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  42. JamesArndt

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    This is a bit related, but how refreshing it was to use Beast in 4.6 again! I was getting horrible performance on Android for my karting project. Stutters, slowdowns on framerate. I did every performance trick in the book and only slightly improved things. So I started porting over assets from 5.3.1 yesterday into the latest 4.6 and made a quick build once I got decently in. Holy cow, just smooth as butter performance like I had NEVER seen in 5.3. I have zero stutters, zero framerate drops, and Beast bakes my lightmaps in about 25 seconds! Not to mention the lightmaps just look better than anything I was baking in 5.3. I am going to stay in 4.6 for most mobile based projects as long as I can. It's almost like they should take the core of what was 4.6 and make it the "mobile" version of the Unity editor vs. trying to make everything work in a global solution with Enlighten and the Standard Shader (Don't get me started on it's mobile performance).
     
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  43. idurvesh

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    Infact we are planning to do so same for our upcoming mobile game as Unity 5 seems terrible.... Can you share lil bit about your game,its complexity and what was exactly were causing performance drop? how unity 4.6 helped you with it? Were you using precomputed GI or Baked GI? were you using unlit shaders or standard ?
     
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  44. hippocoder

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    All things being equal, the performance should be the same or better than 4.6, so I guess this would really worry Unity, being a clear regression.
     
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  45. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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    Enlighten is a big problem right now, especially for trying to bake lightmaps for an interior level with distortion free UVs and scaled lightmaps (you don't need full scale lightmaps for each mesh, scale it down). I also had to take my edges, harden them, and pray I get a clean result. Ended up with 77 lightmaps which is extreme for what I'm trying to do! (I'm working on a dojo interior and the light is diffused by shoji screens)

    I'm making a fighting game and most of my elements will be static so baking lightmaps will have to do. But getting the clean results I had in Beast is tougher now (I try to avoid allowing Unity to generate my UVs)

    Setting up lightmaps should be simple. As for skyboxes, I'll have to use a half sphere with my cube map set to static and bake. With Beast, I can turn off the ambient light and bake straight from the IBL itsellf, so yes you guys need to use a cube object with your cube map applied and set that to static. Ambient light is antiquated. And if I have my mesh set to static and I have a skybox active, ambient light should not leak into the room
     
  46. JamesArndt

    JamesArndt

    Joined:
    Dec 1, 2009
    Posts:
    2,932
    It's a karting game, so it's got physics going on, but VERY simple. Think of it as controlling a sliding ice cube on the ground, no wheelColliders, etc. In 5.3 I was using the Mobile-Diffuse with non-directional lightmaps, no normals or spec on the tracks. I turned off Precomputed GI and solely used the baked GI, baked out static lighting. I kept the physics solver count below a value of 12 or so. I kept the quality level at "Good" for both versions..no anti-aliasing, etc. I had previously atlased all of my textures onto sheets and combined areas of the track for culling. I don't know how to explain it (can't profile without Pro Android license in 4.6). Everything feels way snappier: I mean everything, using the editor, editing particles, baking lightmaps, build times to the device and in the end, how the build runs on the device. Hands down I see better performance in 4.6, for Android builds. I haven't directly ported any PC/Mac projects yet and for PC builds, Unity 5.3 seems fine (with the exception of sluggish editor, sluggish particle editing and insane lightmap baking times).

    A couple of odd things I noticed that concerned me. I baked my lighting in Unity 5.3 to lightmaps, turned off all lights in the scene. However when opening the Enlighten lighting window and adjusting the ambient intensity it was affecting all of my geometry. Is there some weird Enlighten contribution I am not aware of? Same project in Unity 4.6, I adjusted ambient intensity and nothing changed, all lighting is fully baked down properly. It's stuff like this that concerns me when it comes to performance on mobile....what is contributing to what.

    Second odd thing noticed in lightmap baking. Unity 5.3 fancy Enlighten system and all, lightmaps look worse than my Beast lightmaps. They look more dull and less vibrant and appear to have a lower range of light intensity. In my Beast lightmaps I see a really nice vibrancy in the lighting and a nicer, deeper occlusion.

    This is more of a peeve of mine as well, I have tested using the Standard Shader on my Android projects as well and whenever I used it I see dramatically reduced frame time...so not sure if that's even viable to be used in environments on Android development. However when I used the legacy mobile shaders or even the legacy shaders alone, the frame time is increased. So I have no clue why the things that work best for mobile would be marked as "legacy" . Sounds as if the only things that work well for mobile will be removed at some point!
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2016
    idurvesh likes this.
  47. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

    Joined:
    Jan 5, 2010
    Posts:
    4,458
    So I wonder how to get rid of those dark splotches on my enlighten renders... there is no ray count ( how can this get left out is beyond me) so there is no way to get clean bakes :( without cranking up the resolution and waiting til doomsday for completion. And light probes are a pain to do without ambient
     
  48. AaronC

    AaronC

    Joined:
    Mar 6, 2006
    Posts:
    3,552
    This.

    No instructions on how to use this non-optional "feature" only slideshow performance and a bunch of unexplainable experiences when trying to use this.

    It either doesn't work as expected, doesn't work at all or does either AND runs like a dog that is not a greyhound.
     
  49. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

    Joined:
    Jan 5, 2010
    Posts:
    4,458
    Ambient light shouldn't be affecting everything, equally PERIOD. Especially light from outdoors. If I bake an object with some ambience (which is needed for things like light probed geometry) the ambient should spill ino the room through the window. Beast handled this PERFECTLY
     
    JamesArndt likes this.
  50. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2012
    Posts:
    6,225
    If you want nice shadows in 4.7, buy Shadow Softener, it's 50 bucks and gives you shadow that look much better than 5.3