Scene Independent Lighting Data (Bake Prefabs)
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Summary
The Scene is often used as a hub for collaboration, or as a method for managing the loading and unloading of data when streaming content. Projects often split content into many scenes for these reasons. Currently lighting data (the lighting data asset, light probe coefficients, lightmaps, and reflection probes) is bidirectionally referenced to / from the scene file. This means that it quickly becomes challenging to manage unloading scenes while preserving lighting data which may still be needed by rendered objects in the Scene.
This limitation of the current architecture also means that there is currently no efficient workflow for including baked lighting data within prefabs This further limits the options when needing to additively load objects when in Play mode.
Use Case / Intended Outcome
With scene independent lighting data, creators will be able to use native Unity functionality to more easily manage how lighting data is stored and then loaded at runtime. For example, lighting data could be stored per-prefab, per volume or via a scene-agnostic lighting manager.
By decoupling lighting data from the scene, lighting artists will be able to work in parallel with other disciplines with fewer interdependencies, which has the potential to unlock more effective authoring in team environments. We also see the possibilities for facilitating new game types by supporting procedurally generated levels with dynamically loaded content.