Lighting

Typical Recommended Setup

Lightmapping Settings

• Lightmapper: GPU lightmapper is a lot faster than others. If your graphics card is not good enough to this, Unity will switch it to CPU automatically. (In the case, lower Max Lightmap Size and try again.)
• Direct Samples: 32 is default and good enough. You can decrease for the fast iteration and increase to have better result.
• Indirect Samples: 512 is default and good enough. If your scene doesn’t have much direct light and use bounced lights mostly, like indoor and sun light from outside is the only light source, and if you see noises on the lightmaps, increase this like 768. But it will increase baking time a lot.
• Environment Samples: 256 is default and good enough. This is sample count of lights from your skybox. If you still see noises after increasing Indirect Samples, try increase this. This count is necessary when you have less light objects and most of lighting is done with skybox.
• Min/Max Bounces: 1 for min and 2 for max is default and good enough.
• Filtering: Auto is default and I’d recommend not to set this manully because it’s very easy to cause noises or artefacts with this Filtering option.
• Lightmap Resolution: 30 is relatively good, but this varies depending on your environment. Our Public Park has 37 and it has 8 of 1k lightmaps. Our Agora has 27 and it has 9 of 2k lightmaps and 1 of 1k lightmap. You need to find the best number and it is important for efficient use of lightmaps. The larger your environment is, the lower your lightmap resolution will have to be since having too many lightmap textures will use too much memory.
• Lightmap Padding: 2 is default and you don’t need to change this.
• Max Lightmap Size: Note that Unity bakes lightmaps per object. So if there’s not enough space for the lightmap to bake the object, Unity will create another lightmap so 1024 could waste more pixels than 2048. And if one object is very large, 1024 could be too small to bake details. (Unity will fit it to the max size). 4096 could take too much bandwidth for mobile devices, so 2048 is relatively good.
• Lightmap Compression: This compression option will just set the texture compression to ETC2 or DXT5. We’d recommend to use ASTC(ASTC6x6 or 8x8) instead. You can manually change the format manually in the texture settings after baking. (Note that once you bake lightmaps again, Unity will overwrite the format by this setting.)
• Directional Mode: Only “Non-directional” is currently supported.
• Lightmap Parameters: Use ‘Very Low’ when testing and ‘Medium’ will be enough for final. (’High’ if you’re a perfectionist. But it’s hard to notice the difference.)

Tips

• Lighting
• Typical Recommended Setup
• Lightmapping Settings
• Tips