So I’ve completed a whole bunch of tests and I’m not getting any IBL contribution in my lightmap batch bakes. Portal lights do affect the scene, but the IBL’s FG contribution appears to be zero.
It works fine in normal renders, just not in bakes.
I’ve tried using an HDR image attached to the IBL as well as a ramp texture, and both cases produce perfect renders but don’t contribute to lightmap bakes.
I can successfully bake out the IBL contribution using the process outlined in the post by Linchpin here but the results are grainy despite setting the FG render quality excessively high.
The only way I can get the IBL contribution to appear in my batch bakes is to cache the FG solution. But being a game environment I would need to cache from hundreds of cameras to be sure that the FG solution was hitting all surfaces, and as I outlined here I am having big problems with getting a universal quality result from caching.
At any rate, this isn’t a long-term viable option.
Caching from a handful of renders results in huge artifacts on surfaces that weren’t visible in one of those cache cameras, or were far from the camera.
I’ve been stuck on this well past deadline, and I’m desperate for help. I know making a deal out of the urgency isn’t going to make a solution magically appear, but if anyone has any tips I would really appreciate hearing them, because right now I’m chasing my own tail.