Version: 2022.3
Language : English
The Progressive GPU Lightmapper (preview)
Lightmapping: Getting started

Lightmapping using Enlighten Baked Global Illumination

The EnlightenA lighting system by Geomerics used in Unity for lightmapping and for Enlighten Realtime Global Illumination. More info
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Baked Global IlluminationA group of techniques that model both direct and indirect lighting to provide realistic lighting results.
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lightmapping backend is deprecated and no longer visible in the user interface by default since 2022.2. It is no longer present from 2023.1 onwards.

Enlighten Baked Global Illumination relies on precomputed real-time global illumination data to generate indirect lighting. This can be an advantage, because you can produce new 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
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fairly quickly after changing 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
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’s lighting. However, Enlighten Baked Global Illumination imposes more UV layout limitations than the Progressive LightmapperA tool in Unity that bakes lightmaps according to the arrangement of lights and geometry in your scene. More info
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.

Render pipeline support

See render pipeline feature comparison for more information about support for Enlighten Baked Global Illumination across render pipelinesA series of operations that take the contents of a Scene, and displays them on a screen. Unity lets you choose from pre-built render pipelines, or write your own. More info
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.

Using the Enlighten lightmapper

To make the Enlighten Baked Global Illumination option visible in the user interface, open Edit > Project Settings > Editor. In the Graphics section of the Editor menu, activate the Enable Enlighten for Baked GI (Legacy) setting.

After you make Enlighten Baked Global Illumination visible in the user interface, you can enable it in the Lighting window. Go to Window > Rendering > Lighting, navigate to Lightmapping Settings in the Lighting window, and set Lightmapper to Enlighten.

You can perform many of the functions available in this window via scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More info
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, using the LightingSettings API.

The following properties are specific to Enlighten. To expose them, select Enlighten in the Lightmapper control.

Property: Function:
Final Gather Calculates the final global illumination light bounce of at the same resolution as the baked lightmap. This improves visual quality, but requires additional time to bake the lighting. If Final Gather is enabled, it exposes the settings Ray Count and Denoising.
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 lightmaps, but increase the time it takes to bake them.
Ray Count Specifies the number of rays the lightmapper emits for every final gather point.
Denoising Applies a denoising filter to the final gather output.

Disabling the default environment contribution

Unity automatically generates an ambient probe and a default Reflection Probe to ensure that environment lighting affects your scene and the GameObjectsThe 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
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in it by default.

To disable the environment contribution in the lighting result for a scene or GameObject that does not have manually created light maps and Light ProbesLight probes store information about how light passes through space in your scene. A collection of light probes arranged within a given space can improve lighting on moving objects and static LOD scenery within that space. More info
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, disable the default Reflection ProbeA rendering component that captures a spherical view of its surroundings in all directions, rather like a camera. The captured image is then stored as a Cubemap that can be used by objects with reflective materials. More info
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and the ambient probe. For more information, see Disabling the SkyManager.

The Progressive GPU Lightmapper (preview)
Lightmapping: Getting started