Lightmap resolution related changes

We would like to address two problems with the current automatic lightmap UV unwrapping in Shapespark:

  1. If some objects have too large area to be packed into a lightmap, the unwrapping fails with a generic message: lightmap resolution too large. Set lightmap resolution to at most X, or decrease lightmap resolution for individual objects. The message doesn’t indicate which objects failed to be packed. In majority of cases there is only a couple of objects in a scene that need to have the resolution reduced. Identifying these objects and suitable resolution requires manual tuning.
  2. We see scenes, especially exteriors, with large number of lightmaps. Because lightmaps are the most expensive assets in terms of download size and GPU memory usage, such scenes can load slowly or fail on mobile devices.

To address these two problems we plan the following changes:

  1. If an object fails to be packed into a lightmap, the resolution of such object will be automatically reduced to the maximum resolution that works.
  2. The editor Bake tab will have a new setting: Max lightmaps (default 2). If a scene cannot be packed into this number of lightmaps, the resolution of all objects will be reduced to the maximum value that allows the scene to be packed.
  3. The editor Objects tab will show if any object had the lightmap resolution reduced and to what value.

It still will be possible to manually configure per object lightmap resolution.

Please let us know if you see any problems with the proposed approach. We aim to include these changes in April release.

1 Like

To address these two problems we plan the following changes:

I like your approach to improve this topic. Here are the questions/suggestions which came into my mind:

  1. For the case that the lightmap of an object is reduced automatically, I suggest that this should be displayed before the baking starts. So we still have the chance to react and improve the scene the way we want.
  2. I welcome these settings, especially the idea to set a max amount of lightmaps for a scene.
  3. Will this be clearly visible as a colored name for the object or with an indicator like *

It sounds like a very welcome feature upgrade.
I would also suggest to have a clear information about what is being changed by the editor. It would be important to get a notice that the lightmap resolution was caped because of the upper limit of lightmaps or that some object received smaller resolution because they didn’t fit into a lightmap.

Thank you for the feedback. Good idea, we will add a message that the resolution was changed, so there is no need to wait for the baking to finish to learn this.

@tim: regarding the (3), the wire-frame view that is used in the Objects tab will show objects with adjusted resolution in different color.