I was curious if anyone has some insight into the advantages/disadvantages of lightbaking in Maya versus lightbaking in Unity 3's "shiny" improved baking functionality.

Coming from my own personal experience here would be pros and cons, but I'd love to hear from people who have had actual experience with both.

Maya Lightbaking:

Pros:
More control over light settings and placement.

Better quality/realism thanks to mentalray.

Cons:
It's an inherently tedious process setting up your bake parameters and is time consuming as it is frustrating. Plus due to mental ray, render times can slow you down as well.

Unity Lightbaking: (Based off of what little I know of it)

Pros:
Much easier to setup, realtime results, drastically reduced implementation time since the maps are already in engine.

Cons:
Less control, lower quality & resolution, no mental ray.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

What do you mean by quality? Beast in Unity has quality controls and you can achieve the same quality as any renderer, lighting control is arguable though.

Pros of rendering in unity:
Calculated in engine so just a single click to see your lighting changes.
No messing with aligning static lights and dynamic lights between apps.
Automatic realtime lighting to fully baked lighting transition over distance.
Normal map shading and specular automatically handled.

Cons of rendering in unity:
For best results Deferred lighting and unity pro are required.
Radiosity only available in unity pro afaik.

Pros of using an external renderer:
Possibly a bit more control.

Cons of using an external renderer:
Very annoying to get lightmaps ingame, especially without writing some scripts.
Need to align dynamic and static lights between apps.
No normal map and specular shading without working an alternate realtime shading system into the render pipeline.

Originally Posted by commander_keen

What do you mean by quality? Beast in Unity has quality controls and you can achieve the same quality as any renderer, lighting control is arguable though.

Hey thanks for the reply,

I guess I meant accuracy more than quality. It just seemed to me that ray trace is logically more accurate than Unity, but then again, since when do we care about perfect accuracy as long as it looks good.

I don't have any experience with Unity 3 light baking yet so I was just hoping for some personal impressions, thank you for that.