Hello folks, it is I, back from the dead.
At my job (making simulation environments) we’re trying to transition from a 2.7x based workflow to a 2.8 one, but one remaining hurdle is the problem of baking lightmaps. These scenes tend to be fairly large (often multiple kilometers across) and so far I’ve not had much luck finding settings for Cycles that can generate reasonably un-noisy results within that context. If I use similar settings and materials in small scenes, I get pretty decent results. But in an actual scene:
The main problem is in those dark black pixels that crop up, especially under the shorter lampposts. They look really awful when seen at scale. I know I could probably get rid of them by increasing the render time, but so far a render time of over an hour has been insufficient, and in the old BI workflow a render time of thirty minutes for one of these maps would have been on the long side. It’s not that I’m impatient; I literally don’t have time to run Cycles for multiple hours for every lightmap I need to bake.
Accuracy can be sacrificed for performance if possible. It is not necessary that these scenes be ultra-realistic, we just need lights to cast light and objects to cast shadows.
Thanks!
