This is what it looks like when adding a

[royal abyss]

Different probably because the mixed light can utilize the smoothness and normal maps

But the noise is still there underneath

[unborn breach]

Yes for sure.

[royal abyss]

It's also possible that the noise appears more clearly because the color is darker after multiplying with the base color

This doesn't seem to point out to any issue with editor versions

[unborn breach]

Yeah I think so too. But no matter what settings I use, I cant seem to get rid of the noise. I tried everything I could think of

I also tried creating my own lightmap UVs but that didnt change anything

Just in general changing the settings does not seem to change anything about the noise

It just remains the same

[royal abyss]

You definitely should be seeing more noise if you disable filtering or denoising

Lightmap compression will introdue some on its own, though

[unborn breach]

That doesnt seem to be the case either. I will try again though and see if I can you show a before and after pciture.

[unborn breach]

I've set the lightmap compression to none in the lighting settings, so that should not be affecting it.

[royal abyss]

Not reassuring if your lighting settings seem to be ignored

[unborn breach]

Yeah exactly. I almost feels like it is just ignoring all the changes I make in the lighting settings

But it seems to be doing that in the other test projects that I made as well.

[royal abyss]

Making them bad on purpose is usually an easy way to find out

But once you're sure the problem is nowhere else, you still have the option to denoise the lightmap textures manually in an external program

[unborn breach]

Hm yeah I guess so, but then I still lose the detail in my textures right?

[royal abyss]

Lightmap textures rarely have detail to lose

[unborn breach]

So the first image is what it looks like with no filtering and only 1 area light and 1 reflection probe in the scene. The second image is with the exact same set up, except now with filtering turned on on the highest possible setting.

[royal abyss]

Just as a sanity check bake with 1, 1, 1 samples

Don't much like seeing that absolutely nothing changed

But it could just be Optix not working
Maybe you already tried OpenImageDenoise but it should be the next option

This test seems to prove that you aren't getting any filtering or denoising, for whatever reason

If drivers are out of date, GPU systems like those can silently fail

[unborn breach]

Good idea, I will try that!

[unborn breach]

Yeah I will also ttry tthe other filtering methods again, see what that does

And I updated my driver yesterday because of this issue haha, so I cant imagine that be the issue here

This is with all sampels set to 1

So looks identical to the higher sample count

[graceful swallow]

it looks identical which might be the problem, are you sure your maps are actually getting rebaked?

[unborn breach]

How can I check that? When I have the folder open with the baked lightmaps, they do seem to get replaced whenever I make a new bake, but I guess I could also ensure they are getting rebaked by deleting all old lightmaps, clearing the baked data and then rebaking?

Or should I approach that differently??

[graceful swallow]

yes, I would do exactly that

[unborn breach]

Just tried doing that and unfortunately, I am still getting the same result D:

[graceful swallow]

your settings look fine, very strange

it doesn't look like a lightmap compression issue

I guess that leaves the shader

maybe you have a material input with a grain AO map, otherwise I have no idea 🙂

[royal abyss]

Grainy AO map or one of the other maps is a good point of concern

[unborn breach]

Removing my ao map in the shader gets rid of the graininess, but in my texturing software (or with mixed lighting in Unity), it's not grainy at all?

I am a bit confused how that can be causing the issue. Do you know why?

[royal abyss]

But this is really weird to me
With those samples they should be blotchy as hell
Another sanity check would be to change the Albedo Boost and Indirect Intensity, and rebake

That should produce a messed up result, or at least change something

[unborn breach]

Putting those to a crazy high number you mean right?

And then rebaking

[royal abyss]

Doesn't need to be crazy

[unborn breach]

That does work, so at least we can confirm the lighting settings work haha

[royal abyss]

Good to finally know that xD

[unborn breach]

Hahaha yes

Im very confused about my AO map being the cause of this though. Im used to working with Unreal Engine and in there Ive used those maps with no issues

@royal abyss @graceful swallow Thank you very much for all the help! I think I should be able to figure it out from here and get a much better baking result haha.

Do you guys have any tips on how to keep the normal detaisl when baking the lighting?

[graceful swallow]

the normal map and shading generally becomes more noticable with a reflection probe that's representative of the room or when you add a realtime light

[unborn breach]

Hm yeah I already have a reflection probe in the scene and was trying to avoid realtime lighting, but maybe Ill have to add some realtime/mixed lights, since it seems to captures the details a lot better

[royal abyss]

Directional lightmaps do preserve normals
But they are rather faint, and add relatively much more lightmap size and processing

[graceful swallow]

you can add some relatively small objects with a very bright HDR value that are set "reflection probe static" during baking of the reflection probes and disable then during gameplay. and ensure your reflection probes have HDR enabled. can give some decent results.

[unborn breach]

I now have a nice bake with my normals clearly visible. However I am struggling with one more thing. I keep getting errors on some of my meshes about overlapping UVs in the lightmap. I've tried to play around with the settings and created my own lightmap UVs in the 2nd UV channel (which I double-checked in Blender to make sure there were no overlapping shells), but still I get these errors. Does anyone know why that is happening?

[graceful swallow]

there's a debug view in the scene view that will show you what is overlapping. often it can just be ignored when it's just a few pixel overlapping on the lightmap or you can increase the spacing between UV islands to better suit your project's lightmap resolution