Make LightmapGI use Directional data when lighting metallic surfaces

[Noobot9k]

Currently metallic surfaces in scenes with baked lighting are much darker than they are in a scene with dynamic lighting. The Directional property of LightmapGI doesn't have an effect on this. I would be interested to know if it's possible for the directional data from the lightmap to be used to bake metallic surfaces more convincingly.

Here is a scene with metallic surfaces
Unbaked:

Baked:

And here is the same scene but with the metallicness property of the surfaces set to 0
Unbaked:

Baked:

I prefer the look of the dynamically lit scene with the metallic surfaces but I am unable to recreate that look with baked lighting.

[Noobot9k]

Lighting baked with VoxelGI doesn't cause the scene with metallic surfaces to change in appearance as much as the LightmapGI bake does. The pre-baked scene with VoxelGI is more indicative of how the baked scene will look.

[Calinou]

• Related to Use directional LightmapGI information to display specular lobes for fully baked (static) lights godot#63016.

I would be interested to know if it's possible for the directional data from the lightmap to be used to bake metallic surfaces more convincingly.

The answer is "yes and no". It's technically possible to simulate the specular lobe from direct light for both dielectric and metallic materials, but it's not possible to accurately simulate general indirect specular light (reflections). You need to use a ReflectionProbe node for that.

[Noobot9k]

Well that sounds like it would fix my situation since I tried setting "Specular" on my light source to 0 and in the dynamically lit scene it ended up looking exactly like the baked scene, so I think if I could get specular light in the baked light it would make my baked scene look more similar to the real-time scene.

I searched the discussions to see if this was already a topic but didn't search the issues I guess. I'm glad to see this is already a priority for Godot. thank you for the link.