For all other lighting settings, see Lighting Settings Asset.
Important: The Progressive CPU Lightmapper is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
Use the Unity Compute Light Baker or the Progressive GPU Lightmapper instead. Baked lighting might look different after you change backend, so you might need to adjust your lighting setup.
For more information, refer to Choose a light baking backend and Unity Compute Light Baker.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Lightmapper | Specifies which internal lighting method Unity uses to calculate lightmaps in the Scene when the Default Light Baker in Graphics Project Settings is set to Progressive Light Baker. The options are:
|
| General Settings | This section displays the lightmapping settings available when the Default Light Baker in Graphics Project Settings is set to Unity Compute Light Baker. For more information, refer to Lightmapper settings / General Settings and Unity Compute Light Baker. |
| Lightmap Packing | Controls how Unity arranges UV layouts in lightmaps. The options are:
|
| Lightmap Resolution | Specifies the number of texels per unit for lightmaps.
|
| Max Lightmap Size | Specifies the size (in pixels) of the full lightmap texture, which incorporates a separate region for each included GameObject. The default value is 1024. |
| Lightmap compression | The level of compression the Editor uses for lightmaps. - None: Does not compress lightmaps. - Low Quality: This may use less memory and storage than Normal Quality, but can also introduce visual artifacts. - Normal Quality: This is a good trade-off between memory usage and visual quality. - High Quality: Requires more memory and storage than Normal Quality, but provides better visual results. |
| Ambient Occlusion | Controls the relative brightness of surfaces in baked ambient occlusion. This only applies to the indirect lighting calculated by the lightmapper you are using to bake your lighting. Enabled by default. If Ambient Occlusion is enabled, it exposes three settings: Max Distance, Indirect Contribution, and Direct Contribution. For all three settings, higher values indicate a greater contrast between occluded and fully lit areas. |
| Max Distance | Specifies how far the lighting system casts rays in order to determine whether or not to apply occlusion to an object. A higher value produces longer rays and contributes more shadows to the lightmap, while a lower 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 | Scales the brightness of indirect ambient light bounced and emitted from objects in the final lightmap. This is 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 | Scales the brightness of direct light. This is a value between 0 and 10. The default value is 0. The higher this value is, the greater the contrast the Editor applies to the direct lighting. |
| Directional Mode | Enables the lightmap to store information about the characteristics of the dominant incoming light at each point on an object’s surface. See Directional Lightmapping for more information. The default mode is Directional. |
| Directional | In Directional mode, Unity generates a second lightmap to store the dominant direction of incoming light. This makes it possible for diffuse normal mapped materials to work with the global illumination system. Shaders sample both lightmap textures during rendering. As a result, directional mode requires about twice as much video memory as non-directional mode for the additional lightmap data. Generating the additional directionality texture has an impact on baking performance. Directional lightmaps cannot be decoded on SM2.0 hardware or when using GLES2.0. |
| Non-directional | Non-directional mode lightmaps only include a single texture. As a result, they require less video memory and less storage than directional lightmaps, and are faster to decode in shaders. These optimizations reduce visual quality. |
| Indirect Intensity | Determines the brightness of indirect light stored in real-time and baked lightmaps. This is a value between 0 and 5. A value above 1 increases the intensity of indirect light while a value of less than 1 reduces indirect light intensity. The default value is 1. |
| Albedo Boost | Specifies the amount of light Unity bounces between surfaces. This value is between 1 and 10. Increasing this value pulls the albedo value towards white for indirect light computation. The default value of 1 is physically accurate. |
| Lightmap Parameters | A Lightmap Parameters Asset stores values for settings relevant to Baked Global Illumination. The Editor provides several default Lightmap Parameters Assets to choose from, but you can also create your own lightmap parameters file using the Create New option. See Lightmap Parameters for more information. The default value is Default-Medium. The options are Default-Medium, Default-HighResolution, Default-LowResolution, and Default-VeryLowResolution. |
Note: These settings are slightly different depending on the Default Light Baker selected in your Graphics Project Settings.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Importance Sampling | Enable this to use multiple importance sampling for sampling the environment. This generally leads to faster convergence when generating lightmaps, but can lead to noisier results in certain low-frequency environments. This setting is disabled by default. When your project uses the Unity Compute Light Baker, this setting isn’t available and Unity always uses importance sampling. |
| Direct Samples | The number of samples (paths) shot from each texel. This setting controls the number of samples the light baker uses for direct lighting calculations. Move the slider to improve the quality of direct lighting in lightmaps and Light Probes, at the cost of longer bake times. You can only set the slider to powers of 2. The default maximum value is 1024, but you can change the maximum by typing a new value into the field next to the slider, up to a limit of 230 When your project uses the Unity Compute Light Baker, this setting also controls direct environment sampling and direct emissive sampling. The direct sample count is the number of samples used to sample each light, and needs to be high enough to sample these light types adequately. Environment lighting and emissive geometry with high variation in emission require more direct samples to produce a noise-free result. |
| Indirect Samples | The number of samples (paths) shot from each texel. This setting controls the number of samples the light baker uses for indirect lighting calculations. For some Scenes, especially outdoor Scenes, 128 samples should be enough. For indoor Scenes with emissive geometry, increase the value until you see the amount of noise is acceptable. Move the slider to improve the quality of indirect lighting in lightmaps, at the cost of longer bake times. You can only set the slider to powers of 2. The default maximum value is 8192, but you can change the maximum by typing a new value into the field next to the slider, up to a limit of 230 When your project uses the Unity Compute Light Baker, indirect emissive and indirect environment contributions use this setting, in the same way as other lights. |
| Environment Samples | The Environment Samples property determines the total number of environment rays that Unity fires toward the skybox to gather light directly. Unity fires these rays from the lightmap texel or light probe position depending on the context. The default value is 256. Higher values might yield smoother results, but at the cost of increased bake times. You can only set the slider to powers of 2, with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 2048. In Scenes with HDR skyboxes, more samples are often needed to reduce noise in the final lightmap or probe. Scenes with skyboxes that include bright singularities (such as the sun) or high-frequency details with significant contrast (such as backlit clouds) also benefit from a higher number of samples. When your project uses the Unity Compute Light Baker, this setting isn’t available. Refer to Direct Samples instead. |
| Light Probe Sample Multiplier | Controls how many samples are used for Light Probes as a multiplier of the sample values above. Higher values improve the quality of Light Probes, but they will take longer to bake. To enable this feature, go to Project Settings > Editor and disable Use legacy Light Probe sample counts. The default value is 4. |
| Max Bounces | The maximum number of bounces you want the light baker to include in indirect lighting calculations. Default value: 2. Range: 0 - 100. Values of up to 10 are suitable for most Scenes. Values higher than 10 might lead to significantly longer bake times. Each bounce increases the computational resources needed to bake your scene. Use higher bounce values for indoor Scenes, and lower bounce values for outdoor Scenes and those with many bright surfaces. |
| Filtering | Configure how the light baker applies post-processing to lightmaps to limit noise. For lightmap post-processing, Unity splits the lightmap into Direct, Indirect, and Ambient Occlusion targets that Unity applies post-processing to individually before it composites them together into a single lightmap. - Direct: Any light that arrives directly from a Light to a sensor (usually the Camera). - Indirect: Any light that arrives indirectly from a Light to a sensor. This most commonly applies to light that reflects off other GameObjects. - Ambient Occlusion: Any ambient light that the lighting system calculates. The options are:
|
Set Filtering to Advanced to manually configure options for each type of lightmap target. The target types are:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Denoiser | Select a denoiser to use for the lightmap target. The options are: - Optix: The NVIDIA Optix denoiser is an AI accelerated denoiser that reduces noise in baked lightmaps. It requires an NVIDIA GeForce, Quadro, or Tesla GPU with Maxwell or newer generation architecture, using driver version R495.89 or above. Optix is only supported on Windows. - OpenImageDenoise: Intel’s Open Image Denoise is an AI-accelerated denoiser that reduces noise in baked lightmaps. - None: Do not use a denoiser. |
| Filter | Select a filter to use for the lightmap target: - Gaussian: Select this to use a Gaussian filter for the lightmap target. The Gaussian filter applies a bilateral Gaussian filter on the lightmap. This blurs the lightmap and reduces the visible noise. - A-Trous: Select this to use an A-Trous filter for the lightmap target. The A-Trous filter minimizes the amount of blur while it removes visible noise in the lightmap. - None: Select this to disable all filtering for the lightmap target. |
| Radius | This option is only available when Filter is set to Gaussian. Use the Radius value to set the radius of the Gaussian filter kernel in texels. A higher Radius increases the blur strength and reduces the perceptible noise, but might cause detail to be lost in the lighting. |
| Sigma | This option is only available when Filter is set to A-Trous. Use the Sigma value to adjust how much to preserve detail or blur the lighting. A higher Sigma increases the blur strength and reduces the perceptible noise, but might cause detail to be lost in the lighting. |
The following settings are available only if you set Lightmap Packing to Custom.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Packing Method | Sets the algorithm Unity uses to arrange UV layouts into lightmaps. The options are:
|
| Packing Iterations | Sets the number of packing attempts Unity makes to find the tightest lightmap texture layout. Higher values mean packing takes longer. This setting is available only if you set Packing Method to XAtlas. |
| Lightmap Padding | Sets the minimum space between UV layouts in lightmap textures, in texel units. The default is 2. |
| Fixed Lightmap Size | Ensures all lightmap textures are the same size. The maximum size is the value you set Max Lightmap Size to. |
| Block Aligned Padding | Aligns UV layouts to a 4 × 4 texel grid in lightmap textures. Enabling this setting might reduce artifacts caused by block texture compression, but UV layouts might be less tightly packed. This setting is available only if you set Packing Method to XAtlas. |
| Repack Underused Lightmaps | Repacks lightmap textures at a lower resolution if they’re mostly empty, to use less memory. Enabling this setting might increase packing time and the number of lightmaps. This setting is available only if you set Packing Method to XAtlas. |
The panel below the Generate Lighting button shows statistics about the lightmapping, including:
The progress bar that appears while Unity is baking the lightmap provides an “estimated time of arrival” (displayed as ETA). This is the estimated time for the current bake to complete. This allows for much more predictable baking times and allows you to quickly learn how much time baking takes with your current lighting settings.