I’d like to request a feature - it’s quite simple:
I do Archviz work and find myself going from preview to high/production and back to preview quite often when there are problems or changes that need to be made.
When I go for a high quality bake, assuming I’ve bumped up all my mesh lightmap resolutions, going back for preview bakes to fix stuff is pretty hellish if I wanna work fast - that is, lowering the resolutions back down for quicker bakes.
How about a system to save current states of lightmap resolutions for all the meshes in the scene, so in a mouse click you can go back and forth between the presets you want for low and high quality bakes?
Don’t change resolution for preview bakes. Change the quality of the lightmass. That’s it. Resolution of lightmaps on object is something you should set up once and never touch again. At least when it comes to default, official, CPU lightmass, performance is not linearly dependent on resolution. So just use these:
They are present there exactly to solve the problem you are having. It may be a bit of UI/UX failure though, as “Lighting Quality” doesn’t do enough to imply this is specifically related to Lightmass.
If you switch between preview and production, you should see a tremendous difference in lightmass calculation speed. Even in very complex, large scenes, where production quality can take up to half an hour to compute, preview quality still consistently finishes it in around 30 seconds.
CPU Lightmass uses photon mapping with some sort of irradiance/final gathering for primary bounces, so the resolution has indeed non linear impact on rendering speed, unlike path tracing. But even with path traced lightmass, such as the unofficial GPU one or the new experimental GPU one, it still makes much more sense to keep the resolutions always the same, and just adjust the quality of the sampling instead.
This isn’t like regular offline rendering, where you’d do preview renders at 720p and then finals at 4k or something
