Learn how to use Beast Lightmapping in Unity
Lightmapping is a common technique used to augment real-time rendering to improve the visual appearance of a scene. It works by baking down all of the environment lighting for your scene into a separate texture map with specially optimized UVs for all the objects. This allows you to maintain the look-and-feel of the scene without needing any dynamic lights, saving memory and processing power.
What we will be covering
In this two part video tutorial, we’ll take an in-depth look at using Beast, Unity’s integrated lightmapping solution. We will start out by discussing the basic workflow for using Beast. From there, we’ll look at various topics such as lightmap atlasing, resolution, and controlling exposure. Lastly, we’ll wrap things up by taking a look at advanced Beast settings and methods for working with the baked lightmaps.
For more information on lightmaps check out the Unity manual section on Lightmapping here.
Good stuff! I actually realized a few weeks ago that I didn’t understand lighting in Unity hardly at all. More tutorials on the subject would be great, right from the basics!
Unity 4.0 or prior Unity 3.5…edition?
Beast was integrated with Unity 3, and as far as i knew there was no change in this area with Unity 4. Should work with Unity 3 up to Unity 4.
Cool, thanks. I will have to renew my membership again. I’ve been waiting for more Unity tutorials before I renewed.
Unity 4 got some nice updates with beast for mobiles as well as I believe Beast itself got a nice set of improvements (well at least in my dev build it did), There was also some behind the scenes improvements with unity 4.0 so things work better
-Alex
Cool, well I’m not upgrading to Unity 4 until they either do another Mobile giveaway, or I’m done with my current game (or money magically appears for me to use).
This is very interesting… Thank you Wes!
On a side note:
I would like to ask you something Mr. McDermott Sir… Could you maybe, perhaps or possibly take over “Modo Cookie”?
A little dry there at the moment… :S
Good video. Clued me into directional lightmapping. Looking forward to finding out how to adjust texels in next video. Thanks.
Thanks!
This week I was wondering about it and then this tutorial appears, great!
Can we have the scene file ?
I don’t think this scene file is included, but we will be having some assets coming to UC at some point.
-Alex
Question… isn’t getting access the scene files sorta the important point of becoming a paid citizen?
That’s a rhetorical question.
Yes, most definitely. I will check into getting the scene files uploaded ASAP.
Thanks everyone for the kind words! Glad you liked the training. More coming : ) The scene file is not included, but I can see about getting it uploaded.
I appreciate if you can upload the scene file but anyway thx a lot for your great tutorial !
Lovely Vid. I was wondering if there is a way of removing seams that appear between texture tiles as a result of using the texture atlas (as is evident on the ground tiles). I have found myself scaling the UVs so that they are a few pixels inside the perimeter of the texture in the atlas kind of like pixel padding. But this can leave its own kind of seam.
This is called texture bleed, I like to leave a 3-6 pixel bleed between textures on my atlas to fix this problem.
Oh to elaborate on this, scale your UV and your texture down slightly, and then fade between that texture and the surrounding textures to get the bleed. I use a photoshop action to automate this, but you can do it manually with some blur filters.
Is this tutorial for Unity Pro? Or can I use the free version?
Hi Eduardo,
This tutorial will work for both Unity Pro and Free version. Beast is available in the free version. The big difference is the free version of Beast is missing Global Illumination advanced features.