We wanted to share a quick update on the Progressive Lightmapper
that is currently closed in Alpha testing.
For the uninitiated, the Progressive Lightmapper is a new path tracing
based solution we are working on adding to Unity for baked lighting.
Unity today uses Enlighten as its solution to for baked and realtime pre-computed lighting.
As Enlighten does not suit every use case for baked lighting,
we wanted to create a solution that not only gives great results for baked lights,
but also offer lighting artists the ability to iterate quickly and predictably.
We are getting positive feedback on the Alpha build that we put together thus far,
so let's take a quick look at what working with the Progessive Lightmapper actually looks like.
To kick off the lighting workflow, I'll jump over to the Lighting window
and choose the Progressive Lightmapper as my lighting solution for baked GI
and ensure that I'm in Auto mode.
The lights in my scene have been set to Baked mode and my Ambient GI
is also going to be baked because I'm only using baked GI in this example.
Now what you'll notice as I move around the Scene view
is that my lighting bake begins to resolve in the scene.
You can see the path tracer doing its thing.
So our Progressive Lightmapper can either bake your entire scene as usual
or can use the Prioritize View setting.
This feature gives you the ability to get a quick idea of what you're latest
will look like in whatever part of the scene you're focused on.
You can see as I navigate around the scene, lighting resolves,
focusing on providing a preview as quickly as possible.
Then once this completes, it continues to bake the rest of the level outside of the current view.
And if I adjust my lighting, you can see that we get an update immediately,
giving a quick preview of what the change looks like before it resolves in more detail.
I can even try a different lighting treatment and check that out with a quick preview.
I'll take out my Directional sunlight...
change my ambient lighting...
and switch on some scene lights that I prepared earlier.
Now let's try adding a couple more...
and as you can see, I quickly get a preview of what I'm doing as I work on it.
Let's switch back to our daytime lighting treatment
and quickly we can get back the result we had before.
It's worth noting here that if I choose to include Ambient Occlusion in the bake,
I can even test out different looks during the baking process.
Another great thing about Progressive Lightmapper
is that we have far more predictable bake times
and as such we are able to provide an ETA within the
lighting progress bar in the lower right of the screen.
As your bake resolves, you're likely to want
to prioritize some of the objects in your scene.
For example, with this tower I would want to increase the scale.
So I select the Renderer and then increase its scale and lightmap.
This allows you to set a baseline resolution for everything and
then finetune certian objects that need more detail lighting.
The Progressive Lightmapper reevaluates its lighting to account for the change.
One more useful feature we included is the ability to force stop the bake
and matain your lightmap data at this point in time if you're happy with the results.
This can be done if you're baking manually outside of Auto mode
and it means you can pickup and putdown lightmap baking without
having to start from scratch within a single Unity session.
We believe that the Progressive Lightmapper brings
more power and flexability to working on lighting.
We plan to ship one further closed Alpha build of
this Progressive Lightmapper before going public
with an experimental build later this year.
So stay tuned to the formn, blog, and our social channels with news of this as it ships.
Thanks for watching.
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