I’m really struggling to get a nice clean bake for my scene. The areas of concern are the main gallery ceiling and the ceiling in the bridge.
I increased the lightmap resolution for both objects to 120 but the results look even worse.
The curved ceiling in the bridge has visible steps and looks all jaggy.
I have made all the glass transparent for the bake to allow more sun and sky light, I also added area lights at the rear of the gallery by the aluminum column to bring some more light into the gallery.
Even at a super bake there are still issues. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also one more thing (sorry to be so demanding) there is an invisible rectangular box in the balcony void in the center of the gallery, it is supposed to stop the ability to accidently walk through that area and down into the empty space below, but it’s not working as expected after I upload the scene?
Try to change that ceiling texture, I think the one you use is that stained.
Also, pay attention to how the texture is applied, I show you some pictures because my sketch is in Spanish and I don’t remember how to say it in English
you have to make sure that the transparent box is floor to ceiling and also that it has its positive surfaces towards the balcony and not towards the hole, otherwise shapespark will not recognize it.
Thank you so much Jorge, I’m puzzled because the drop ceiling is RBG 0.8 and no texture applied just a solid colour. I’ll try a super bake this weekend to see if it cleans up.
The ceiling in the bridge is smoothed, once again hoping the super bake will make a difference.
I’ll expand the invisible box from floor to ceiling to see if that works. I had it hidden from all views so maybe Shapespark completely disregards it? I’ll try making it completely transparent and isolate shadow enabled.
Thanks once again for your advice and your English is perfect and way better than my Spanish!
The gamma just accentuates the splotchiness. I’m sure a super bake will clean it up, I’m also trying giving the troublesome objects a plain white bitmap texture, maybe there will be more "resolution’ assigned to the object for the bake.
Main gallery
It looks like there are some lights generating high amount of noise in the gallery, and the denoiser cannot remove it completely. In most cases the culprit are lights placed very close nearby objects and generating very small but strong reflections on these objects.
To detect such lights it’d be best to turn off all the lights, including emissive materials, except the natural and external ones. To turn off a light it’s enough to set its strength to 0. Then, you could enable some of them, and check if there is visible noise on the ceiling after the bake. I think you wouldn’t have to use high-quality baking settings for this investigation, 100-200 samples should be enough to differentiate between bakes with low and high amount of noise.
Curved ceiling
Does the curved ceiling have rounded edges? In other words does the vertical surface joins the horizontal surface at a right angle, or is the join smooth? If it’s smooth could you change it to hard (right angle)? Limited lightmap resolution might cause that some lightmap pixels for a long and thin smooth edge represent light coming horizontally (stronger, directly from the window), while the others represent light coming vertically (weaker, reflected from the floor).
Invisible box
As @jorgearq said, the box has to be oriented towards the camera. And you are right: the box shouldn’t be hidden. Make it visible in all views, but set its opacity to 0 and lightmap resolution to 0 (so it won’t be baked at all).
