Not able to understand what's wrong with baking this scene

1

Hello Team Shapespark,

I need help with baking this scene. I have experimented with different settings of the light baking, but not able to figure out what’s wrong and why am I getting such a spotchy look.

demotour
demotour1920×800 461 KB

This result was achieved when I had below settings

Samples - 800
Resolution - 100
Lightmaps - 3
Sky Strength - 0.1 (for darker shadows)
Sun Strength - 8

demotour2
demotour21920×800 554 KB

demotour1
demotour11920×800 943 KB

This was the result with below settings

Samples - 400
Resolution - 100
Lightmaps - 2
Sky Strength - 2 (for letting more light in the scene)
Sun Strength - 10

What should be the right settings to bake this scene correctly with darker shadows ? I am clueless about it

Scene Link - https://tour.virtualhomes.in/demotour

— Update —

I happen to figure out that the lightmap had to be packed under 1 or 2 number of lightmap only and hence it automatically reduced resolution of my meshes while baking. Hence even with high amount of samples the scene wasn’t looking good.

Is there a possibility to bake this kind of a large scene correctly with detailed shadow without scaling down the resolution of meshes and making it low resolution automatically. Can I force the lightmap to bake without lowering resolution? Any alternative suggestions for me to help me with this issue ?

I cannot delete the background effect or remove the large surface for a different reason. Please help !

2

To achieve sharper shadows you can set the size of the sun to 0,01. Maybe this will help you.

1 Like
3

Sorry to not mention it above but it’s already set to 0.01

1 Like
4

To save lightmap space, in the Objects tab set Custom lightmap resolution to 0 for the large map object on which all the buildings are placed. You can also set it to 0. You can also set it to 0 for all partially transparent buildings. With such changes more lightmap space will be available for the remaining geometry.

5

So you mean I should select all non important objects and set lightmap res to 0 and only have a high resolution for important things like tower / vegetation etc ? Would it still scale my object res down everytime I am not able to fit it ? Can increasing the number of lightmap help me get high resolution? Can I force high resolution on all objects without scaling them down automatically?

6

Increasing the number of lightmaps will prevent scaling. The only exception is when a single object is too large to fit into 4096x4096 lightmap, such object will be always scaled down, no matter how many lightmaps you set. Keep in mind that one 4096*4096 lightmap consumes 67MB of GPU memory and is among the largest resources to download, so with large number of lightmaps the scene will download slowly on slower networks and you can run out of memory on mobile devices.

7

Thanks @jan for the detailed answer. So in my case scenerio, what would you suggest me to do ? Should I try to fit the scene in 1 lightmap only with maybe 100 lightmap resolution ? How many samples would you suggest ?

9

Number of samples do not influence the lightmap size only baking time. More samples produce better quality but require more time to bake.

11

Perhaps, the flat surface consists of more than 1 mesh? If so, you’d have to set custom lightmap resolution to 0 for all these meshes. Or, if they have a parent object, it’d be enough to set the custom resolution for the parent, and the children wil inherit it.