Lightmapping Settings
To open the Lightmapping Settings, go to Window > RenderingThe process of drawing graphics to the screen (or to a render texture). By default, the main camera in Unity renders its view to the screen. More info
See in Glossary >Lighting Settings, and navigate to Lightmapping Settings.
| Property: | Function: | |
|---|---|---|
| LightmapperA tool in Unity that bakes lightmaps according to the arrangement of lights and geometry in your scene. More info See in Glossary |
Use this to specify which internal lighting calculation software to use to calculate lightmaps in the Scene. This is set to Progressive CPU by default. The Progressive lightmappers have a set of sub-properties that appear underneath this property. See the following documentation pages for details on these settings: - Progressive CPU - Progressive GPU (Preview) The third option is EnlightenThe lighting system by Geomerics used in Unity for computing global illumination (GI). More info See in Glossary, a non-progressive lightmapper. See Enlighten documentation for more information. |
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| Indirect Resolution | Use this to specify the number of samples the lightmapper uses for indirect lighting calculations. Higher values can improve the quality of the lightmapsA pre-rendered texture that contains the effects of light sources on static objects in the scene. Lightmaps are overlaid on top of scene geometry to create the effect of lighting. More info See in Glossary, but increase the time it takes to bake them. |
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| Lightmap Resolution | Use this to specify the number of texels per unit to use for lightmaps. Increasing this value improves lightmap quality, but also increases bake times. Note that doubling this value causes the number of texels to quadruple (because the value refers to both the height and width of the lightmap). Check the Occupied texels count in the stats, documented below this table. | |
| Lightmap Padding | Use this to specify the separation (in texel units) between separate shapes in the baked lightmap. The default value is 2. | |
| Lightmap Size | The size (in pixels) of the full lightmap texture, which incorporates separate regions for the individual GameObjectThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info See in Glossary textures. The default value is 1024. |
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| Compress Lightmaps | A compressed lightmap requires less storage space, but the compressionA method of storing data that reduces the amount of storage space it requires. See Texture Compression3D Graphics hardware requires Textures to be compressed in specialised formats which are optimized for fast Texture sampling. More info See in Glossary, Animation CompressionThe method of compressing animation data to significantly reduce file sizes without causing a noticable reduction in motion quality. Animation compression is a trade off between saving on memory and image quality. More info See in Glossary, Audio Compression, Build Compression. See in Glossary process can introduce unwanted visual effects into the texture. Tick this checkbox to compress lightmaps, or untick it to keep them uncompressed. The checkbox is ticked by default. |
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| Ambient OcclusionA method to approximate how much ambient lighting (lighting not coming from a specific direction) can hit a point on a surface. See in Glossary |
Tick this checkbox to open a group of settings which allow you to control the relative brightness of surfaces in ambient occlusion. Higher values indicate a greater contrast between the occluded and fully lit areas. This only applies to the indirect lighting calculated by the GI system. This setting is enabled by default. | |
| Max Distance | Set a value to control how far the lighting system casts rays in order to determine whether or not to apply occlusion to an object. A larger value produces longer rays and contributes more shadows to the lightmap, while a smaller value produces shorter rays that contribute shadows only when objects are very close to one another. A value of 0 casts an infinitely long ray that has no maximum distance. The default value is 1. | |
| Indirect Contribution | Use the slider to scale the brightness of indirect light as seen in the final lightmap (that is, ambient light, or light bounced and emitted from objects) from a value between 0 and 10. The default value is 1. Values less than 1 reduce the intensity, while values greater than 1 increase it. | |
| Direct Contribution | Use the slider to scale the brightness of direct light from a value between 0 and 10. The default value is 0. The higher this value is, the greater the contrast applied to the direct lighting. | |
| Final Gather |
Final Gather is only available if Lightmapper is set to Enlighten. Enable this if you want the lightmapper to calculate the final light bounce of the global illumination at the same resolution as the baked lightmap. This improves visual quality, but requires additional time to bake the lighting. |
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| Ray Count | Specify the number of rays the lightmapper emits for every final gather point. | |
| Denoising | Enable this to add a denoising filter to the final gather output. | |
| Directional Mode | You can set the lightmap up to store information about the dominant incoming light at each point on the objects’ surfaces. See documentation on Directional Lightmapping for further details. The default mode is Directional. | |
| Directional | In Directional mode, Unity generates a second lightmap to store the dominant direction of incoming light. This allows diffuse normal mapped materials to work with the GI. Directional mode requires about twice as much storage space for the additional lightmap data. Directional lightmaps cannot be decoded on SM2.0 hardware or when using GLES2.0. They fall back to Non-Directional lightmaps. | |
| Non-directional | Non-directional mode disables Unity’s ability to generate a second lightmap to store the dominant direction of incoming light. | |
| Indirect Intensity | Use this slider to control the brightness of indirect light stored in realtime and baked lightmaps, from a value between 0 and 5. A value above 1 increases the intensity of indirect light while a value of less that 1 reduces indirect light intensity. The default value is 1. | |
| Albedo Boost | Use this slider to control the amount of light Unity bounces between surfaces, from a value between 1 and 10. To do this, Unity intensifies the albedo of materials in the SceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info See in Glossary. Increasing this draws the albedo value towards white for indirect light computation. The default value of 1 is physically accurate. |
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| Lightmap Parameters | Unity uses a set of general parameters for the lightmapping in addition to properties of the Lighting window. A few defaults are available from the menu for this property but you can also create your own lightmap parameter file using the Create New option. See the Lightmap Parameters page for further details. The default value is Default-Medium. | |
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