lightmapping

[raw condor]

lightmapping

okie

[soft dome]

i made some objects baked

but didnt generate light yet

i can revert baked right?

[raw condor]

yes

[soft dome]

okay i thought so

[raw condor]

you can always go back to realtime lighting its not a permanent thing

[soft dome]

thats nice

so i just mark all the statics as contribute GI

?

[raw condor]

no you mark only what doesn't move

or what isn't dynamic

[soft dome]

thats what i meant, didnt phrase it right

so i just do that and then generate?

[raw condor]

you could but I like to tweak my settings on the lightmapping window first before I hit generate

first thing I typically do is use the progressive GPU lightmapper

there is a CPU version but its slower, but its there for a reason as there can be cases where the GPU lightmapper fails (which can be due to a variety of things)

[soft dome]

uhuh

are there a few settings you would recommend

[raw condor]

yes, I tend to set these settings to the following...

[soft dome]

should probably say that im making a darker/horror game

[soft dome]

so it'd be more mody

moody*

[raw condor]

I tick of progressive updates, which is a somewhat useful thing as it bakes only the area at which you are looking at, if you want to quickly iterate on your lighting this is a good option but generally I have some patience so I tick it off because it actually goes faster

I tick importance sampling which in english just means it goes faster (though in dark areas it can lead to artifacts but we can get into that later)

[raw condor]

I tend to drop all of the sample counts for direct, indirect, and enviorment to what I set here which are generally pretty low

but right after that I turn on filtering which cleans it all up

[soft dome]

i saw the prog updates, should be good for performance

[raw condor]

for good measure also I like to enable ambient occlusion

though leave direct contribution to 0

[soft dome]

ambient is unavalibe

[raw condor]

because its not enabled by default

[soft dome]

oh?

[raw condor]

so just enable it

its not a requirement to have honestly, for some scenes it may introduce too much contrast

but its up to you whether you want to have it on or not

[soft dome]

i guess i'll just leave it as it is rn

other than that tho, can i bake now?

[raw condor]

yes

[soft dome]

ill try then, might take a bit to generate

ill only do the first areas

[raw condor]

if you want it to go faster you can also drop the quality settings here

to 512 or 256

generally thats usually how most go about baking

drop the settings pretty low just to see how it looks

and once they are happy with how it looks lighting wise then you can increase your resolution/sample counts for a better quality bake

[soft dome]

i see, ill probably do that

also i decided to do ambient occlusion

okay it generated

looks not too shabby rn

[raw condor]

screenshots?

[soft dome]

yeah hold on, generating room 2 for more depth

[raw condor]

doesn't look right

is all of that geometry there marked static?

[soft dome]

actually dont know i can double check

[raw condor]

on there it looks alright, low resolution obviously but that makes sense given what I've told you

[soft dome]

I did forget to mark some of them

regenerating

[raw condor]

yeah make sure you mark them

if its not marked on the bake then it won't see it

[soft dome]

my doors reverted to deafault size and rotation

i didnt mark them tho

[raw condor]

quickest way to see what you've marked is if you switch to the baked lightmap view

make sure this is ticked on

at the bottom

throws a checkerboard pattern on all objects marked contribute gi

[soft dome]

i can check

[raw condor]

alleyway is looking better

seeing some funny buisness with the trees though

[soft dome]

yeah the tree was being weird

its basically static

it doesnt really move

[raw condor]

foliage can generally cuase alot of issues in a bake because of how complex they usually are, but one thing I would check on is for all of your tree materials

make sure that this field

on the materials

is enabled

what happens in a lightmapper is that triangles are usually culled from the back, like in typical rendering, and what happens in a lightmapper is that these rays are terminated and typically you get really funky looking artifacts like you see here

or in here in my test scene for example

[soft dome]

how can you get rid of artifacts

[raw condor]

which is caused by this geometry being raised, and on the bottom of it there is no geometry inside or behind

[raw condor]

well its important to distinguish what kind of artifacts they are

in my example what im showing here are artifacts caused by ray termination

[raw condor]

and you can fix that by ticking this field here in the material properties

fixed

[soft dome]

should so every material with an artifact should have doublesided ticked

?

[raw condor]

no

because double sided in some instances in certain edge cases can lead to light leaking through geometry

so its really only turn it on, on materials that you see are problematic

[soft dome]

oh okay

ill turn the house material into doublesided then?

because of the artifacts

or at least try

[raw condor]

go for it

[soft dome]

ill test

the tree looks better now btw

fixed it

[raw condor]

hows it look

[soft dome]

i can show you but i cant seem to find double sided on my house material

[raw condor]

so heres how to know when you'll get that artifact

[raw condor]

yeah that alleyway looks better now

but just to finish up the tangent

heres how you know when that artifact will appear

I have barricade meshes here

and if you notice below them there is some wierd light leaking happening

zooming in closer you can see more of the funky shenangins going on

now this barricade mesh its worth noting, has no polygons on the underside of it

if I look under we can see the mesh becomes invisible

because there are no polygons there

[soft dome]

this is up close

[raw condor]

zoom out

in that case that might not be a ray termination issue, that looks to be improper lightmap UVs

[raw condor]

ah so its probably a ray termination issue there

I have a question to ask though

are you ever going to see that area in game?

[soft dome]

yes i guess

[raw condor]

alright then, because its worth noting that in far away or inacessible areas it can be common to see those artifacts and in many cases you can get away with it because its never going to be seen by the player

[raw condor]

but in your case, the issues are caused by the concrete material that you have

from the stairs and that little corridor

not from the house itself

I can tell because in an earlier screenshot

in your baked lightmap view

[raw condor]

I can see the outer walls

[soft dome]

i see

[raw condor]

but in your shaded view

the outer walls of that corridor are culled

[raw condor]

like in here

[soft dome]

well you dont get that close to it ever

[raw condor]

then you don't have to fix it

but just for the sake of learning

we'll try to fix it

but based on what I saw

I can tell those ray termination artifacts are caused by that corridor and its materials

so enable double sided on them

[soft dome]

oh okay hold on

[raw condor]

there is also another way to solve it but I don't think i'll get into it as it'd be hard to explain

[soft dome]

i dont seem to have the option of double sided

if this is even where its supposed to be

[raw condor]

its supposed to be in the material tab, but yeah doesn't seem to be on that shader

I would actually try setting the render face mode

from front

to all or off

I forget the options it has

[soft dome]

both

its both

[raw condor]

set it to both and bake

[soft dome]

it should fix it i think tbh

hold on

its gone now seems like

[raw condor]

show me

[soft dome]

also this door is dark compared to the rest of the area

[raw condor]

how are these meshes made

are they made using pro builder or have you made them through an external modeling package like blender/maya etc?

[soft dome]

some are imported

some are probuilder

[raw condor]

for the imported meshes I would go in the import settings and enable generate lightmap UVs

[soft dome]

where do i find the import settings

[soft dome]

it crashed trying to generate lmao

hold on