OTOY Forums

While working on my last art project, I've developed an open source pipeline for baking lighting in Unity with Octane, with the help of Jason Gendreau.

The tool helps automate the following steps:
-Assigning a bake ID to each object
-Creating the bake camera with a matching bake ID
-Naming the bake camera in a logical manner
-Baking the camera image
-Creating a material for the bake image
-Assigning the image to the material
-Assigning the material to the original object

It also contains a Shell materials that allows you to switch between the original and baked materials in case you need to rebake your scene.

Please give it a try and give us some feedback!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlNEOLj0VSo
https://github.com/c-vim/salvo

Looks cool. Great to see people are using the C# api.
Is there a reason you arnt using the build-in lightmapper?

Cheers.

Hi Chris! Glad you got to have a look at it!

The main reasons is that this was started in January, where had no solid timeline for a Unity Octane Baking integration. I needed to be 100% sure we could get this done as I needed by June.

There is an integration available at the moment, but I can't seem to get it working the way I need it to and there seems to be no documentation.

At the moment, I'm not sure how I would bake multiple maps in Octane for Unity using the build-in Octane lightmapper. It seems to calculate a single light map and I needed a lot of maps (about 32 x 4k maps) to have great art gallery level VR lighting quality. I'm also unsure how the current Octane integration in Unity would deal with maps of different sizes on objects, or using the UV maps that were created in other software rather than the Unity system.

As for the Unity native light baker flavors, none of them render as many indirect light bounces as Octane and they don't render as fast either. My art and architecture is based on indirect solar lighting and intricate shadows, so the surface amount of lightmaps is important as well as the ability to have lots of light bounces. Unlike Unity's 3-5 bounce maximum, I used 18 for this scene.

I also have a particular workflow, so a custom algorithm was great and perfectly suited for getting my work done. Now that I have this pretty automated, I've automated about 85% of my work bringing VR art back into VR with incredibly high quality light baking.