Unity 5 shadows - strange artifacting

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We're testing out Unity 5's baked shadows and Enlighten system in one of our scenes, but we're getting the following results which are a bit confusing.

alt text The lighting in part of our scene before the Enlighten bake. Real timelighting and shadows only

alt text The lighting/baked shadows after the Enlighten bake. As you can see, there is a lot of strange artifacting.

On the objects in question, the Unity importer is building new UV maps for the shadows, so I don't believe that's an issue. Also, if you look closely, the floor actually tiles a little. The piece of the floor geometry is an exact, in-maya copy of the previous section that has all the artifacting. Yet, the section closest to the camera exhibits no shadow artifacting whatsoever.

Has anyone else experienced this and/or have any insight into what is the cause of this issue and an accompanying fix.

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Answer by MolluskJesse · Jun 02, 2015 at 11:22 PM

After months, I finally found the solution for this myself as our team worked to make the official jump to Unity 5. This issue can be caused by bad UV's. We had a few house plants in the scene we bought off the Unity store. Something about their baked in Shadow UV's was making Enlighten throw a fit and create the artifacting you see above. To fix this, we went into the model's importer and clicked on "Generate Lightmap UV's." I can't guarantee this will fix this issue in all cases, but it sure helped us.

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alejoasks · Sep 11, 2015 at 04:46 PM 0

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@$$anonymous$$olluskJesse

Hi, thanks for your post. I think it may have helped solving the blotchy/dark spots baking issue I had. I had added other objects which made the dark spots appear into other objects which were fine before. $$anonymous$$y file does not use Unity automatic light mapping but ones set up in Blender.

I have a lot of objects in my scene but I took a closer look at each object (in Blender) and I found out some had a Diffuse UVs and no Lightmap UVs. Other had Lightmap UVs but were not correct. After correcting both these things it baked correctly everything. There were not a lot of objects wrong but it may have been enough to mess up Unity lightmapping.

I guess since Unity 5 uses a more realistic lighting approach than other versions, an error on a particular object may get transfered into others more easily. Just a theory.

Thanks again, I hope this will help other people as well

krstrobe · Aug 25, 2017 at 05:11 PM 0

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oh, thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Didn't get to pulling my hair out, but that was the feeling I had. Thank you!

kikesa72 · Sep 06, 2017 at 02:16 PM 0

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Thank u for share this little secrete.

Unity 5 shadows - strange artifacting

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