Lightmap seam stitching

Seam stitching is a feature that smooths unwanted hard edges in GameObjectsThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info
See in Glossary rendered with baked lightmapsA pre-rendered texture that contains the effects of light sources on static objects in the scene. Lightmaps are overlaid on top of scene geometry to create the effect of lighting. More info
See in Glossary generated by the Progressive LightmapperA tool in Unity that bakes lightmaps according to the arrangement of lights and geometry in your scene. More info
See in Glossary.

When Unity bakes lightmaps, it identifies MeshThe main graphics primitive of Unity. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. Unity supports triangulated or Quadrangulated polygon meshes. Nurbs, Nurms, Subdiv surfaces must be converted to polygons. More info
See in Glossary faces that are close together but separate from each other as being separate in lightmap space; the edges of these Meshes are called “seams”. Seams are ideally invisible, but they can sometimes appear to have hard edges depending on the light. This is because the GPU cannot blend texel values between charts that are separated in the lightmap.

Seam stitching fixes these issues. When you enable seam stitching, Unity does extra computations to amend the lightmap to improve each seam’s appearance. Stitching is not perfect, but it often improves the final result substantially. Seam stitching takes extra time during baking due to extra calculations Unity makes, so Unity disables it by default.

Limitations of seam stiching

Seam stitching works with the Progressive Lightmapper. Seam stitching only works on single GameObjects; multiple GameObjects cannot be smoothly stitched together.

Using seam stitching

You can enable seam stitching on any GameObject with a MeshRenderer component, like this:

1. Select the GameObject
2. In the InspectorA Unity window that displays information about the currently selected GameObject, Asset or Project Settings, alowing you to inspect and edit the values. More info
   See in Glossary, navigate to the MeshRenderer component’s Lightmapping section
3. Enable Stitch Seams

• Seam stitching added in 2017.2 NewIn20172