world-lighting

[rancid tulip]

It's definitely an issue I've had before without sectors though, as though things get assigned to the lightmapper and never unassigned.

[mint cipher]

So, in my world. I used global illumination and baked my lighting. It comes out great everywhere else except in this one room. There are horizontal lines spread all through out it instead of the light surrounding where the emissions are coming from

Any help would be deeply appreciated

[graceful tartan]

Feels like lightmap layout issue.
Is generate lightmaps UVs checked for the model?

[mint cipher]

Of course It is. Yes

@graceful tartan any other ideas as to what it could be?

[graceful tartan]

Just gotta be sure 😊
Is the scale of the object something other than 1? Or at least even in all directions. I've had that cause lightmap issues too

[mint cipher]

You sir, have helped where not even the unity discord server could. Thanks, it works now 🙏

[graceful tartan]

The scale issue strikes again! 🤣 It's just one of the default things I check now if there are weird lightmap issues after the normal stuff is checked.

[mint cipher]

I didn’t even mess with the scale so I was very confused. I threw everything under a armature in blender, hit fix with cats (unchecking the mesh combine) and saved over the model in unity. It evened out the scale on everything and now it’s perfect

Wrote that out in case anyone else runs across that issue and needs a quick fix^

[graceful tartan]

Could be the scale of a bone messed with it or something.
But why did you give it an armature out of curiosity? Does the world need to move or have animations or something?

[mint cipher]

No lol, cats won’t fix a models orientation without the meshes being connected to an armature. It can even be empty with no bones.

So one button click, and everything stayed in the same spot and it reset the values

[graceful tartan]

What did did you need cats to fix? 🤔

[mint cipher]

Just a little trick I use sometimes lol

[graceful tartan]

ive never had to use it, just export the fbx and away it goes

[rancid tulip]

Is there any way to unreference something in the scene from the baked lightmap?

[earnest mantle]

You can uncheck contribute GI under static

[rancid tulip]

That doesn't unreference it, that's exactly the issue I'm having. It instead displays garbage when you reload after doing that.

0 scale in lightmap, yet it thinks it's mapped and has just lightmapped garbage to it instead.

[subtle galleon]

just set the object to not static?

[rancid tulip]

Doesn't clear the lightmap. That's my point, none of the things you'd expect to clear it, do.

Only clearing the whole scene's baked lighting works, but that's bad because I'd need to rebake everything from all the r;

[lunar narwhal]

oh, you want to clear it without rebaking?

[rancid tulip]

I want to clear just the lightmap on this object, or the other problematic objects which shouldn't even be in the lightmap(s) in the first place, rather than clearing all baking.

As you can see above, the lightmap scale is 0 which means it shouldn't be in the lightmap, but it also shows it being assocated to a lightmap.

[lunar narwhal]

well yeah, those will only take effect on bake

if you want to clear the lightmap data from individual objects without a rebake well..

[rancid tulip]

Rebaking doesn't take them out of the lightmap

[lunar narwhal]

setting the object to not contribute gi doesn't take them out when you rebake?

[rancid tulip]

Nope

[lunar narwhal]

just to be clear you unchecked contribute gi here? https://nyanpa.su/i/yBQ32A6b.jpg

[rancid tulip]

Yup. I tried pretty much every combination of clearing things. It's like rebaking doesn't clear it from the lightmap. It's a bit scuffed. The worst part is the mangled mess you're seeing isn't even the lightmap for this region.

I'm using Bakery control zones to spit up the rendering process.

Hence why I don't want to do a clear all.

[lunar narwhal]

when you rebaked did you try clearing all lightmap data first?

I've never used bakery control zones so I can't comment on that

[rancid tulip]

No, I explicitly won't do that. That's why I'm using control zones, so I don't have to rebake 12 other regions

It feels like a bug though that only a full light clear will fix, unfortunately.

[lunar narwhal]

If you really want a quick temporary fix until you do a full rebake later

you can just clone the object and disable the original

the copy won't be lightmapped

[rancid tulip]

Interesting, I'll keep that in mind.

It looks like if you remove something from the lightmap, it loses track of where it's mapped and instead just serves garbage. As it's lost track of who's mapping it, rebaking that zone doesn't clear it either.

[verbal crag]

Hello, I'm encountering an issue with the main light in my world. I added a simple sun light to my world (directional lightning). It works fine on desktop. However when trying it in PC VR or Quest it does not show/cast any shadow on any mesh, the whole scene is simply lit. Any idea why?

[modest vapor]

You have a single light in your world ?

[verbal crag]

Yes I do, I have a single Directional Light that stops casting shadows as soon as I enter play mode

Looks fine in the editor view

Here is in the editor view

Here is as soon as the scene is played

[modest vapor]

Nothing in your console ?

[verbal crag]

No nothing, everything seems fine. Although I just noticed something: In the Unity project Quality tab there is a VRC Mobile Quality preset, and all shadows are disabled by default (I'm allowed to choose from "No Shadows", "Only Hard Shadows" and "Hard & Soft Shadows"). Am I allowed to turn it back on?

[lean whale]

Hm, yeah I'm not sure but I wonder if realtime shadows are disabled no matter what for Quest in VRchat? In that case it would make sense if your Unity project is currently set to build for Android and that it would be overriding your quality settings to disable shadows

[modest vapor]

Yes, but realtime shadows on quest is not suggested, better bake !

[graceful tartan]

While I agree with Ruuubick that you should bake, have you tagged the light editor only maybe?

[verbal crag]

I see, I tried baking but it looked off, very dark shadows and chunks not lit up at all. I will try again, thanks!

[verbal crag]

I checked, it is not tagged

[ripe aspen]

So I've been working on this world for around 2-3 days now and I'm stuck on this problem. everything is pretty much done, however when I bake the lighting, all my light sources (Point lights, baked, hard shadows) do not bake any light onto the surfaces. No light whatsoever. I will attach an image.

Before baking

After Baking

[graceful tartan]

So the first question is, have you set all those objects as static?

[ripe aspen]

all objects are static yes

[graceful tartan]

Does making the lights static help?

[ripe aspen]

idk I'll check

baking

I forgot to make the light fixtures static that's why they are lit up now but everything else is not

light sources themselves are static too

[graceful tartan]

Do you have generate lightmaps checked in the models import settings?

[ripe aspen]

?

that?

[graceful tartan]

Yup. Check that and apply it

[ripe aspen]

thanks

should this take a minute to apply

unity frozen

[graceful tartan]

If your model is complicated it could.

[ripe aspen]

it broke the model

I force quit it because it froze entirely

[graceful tartan]

If you interrupt it mid import the prefab will break like that

You need to let it finish. Generating lightmaps could easily take a minute or two if your model is complex

If it's really complex, like 1mil + polys it could freeze freeze though

[ripe aspen]

I'm not sure honestly

I never decimated it because it ran fine in game and wasn't too large of a world

but maybe

it's just a stripped ship that I built an interior for

[graceful tartan]

Go to the model and right click, reimport and then let it sit for a few minutes event if it goes unresponsive

See if it eventually generates them

Bit I have froze unity trying to generate them for really big complicated models so be aware of that

[ripe aspen]

yeah

thanks for the help though

I'll let you know how it goes

[graceful tartan]

👍

[ripe aspen]

Yeah not gonna let me generate it

gonna go decimate the model

[graceful tartan]

If that fails, separating it into seperate parts helps too if there are lots of actual individual parts in there.

[tulip dirge]

I have a world with reflective surfaces that depend on real time lighting changes but doesnt reflect avatars or certain objects but for some reasons vrc mirror is getting reflected on floor is there way around that

[quaint pecan]

Question, does the LightingData.asset file contribute to the total world download size?

[patent heath]

ye

[graceful tartan]

Out the mirror on a layer that the reflection probe isn't reflecting

[novel stag]

both mesh and light are on static and then baked

and the light is in the sconce

[quaint pecan]

So, if the LightingData.asset file is included in the upload world size, is there I good way I can make my LightingData.asset not be almost 300mb?

[lean whale]

You probably have Realtime Global Illumination enabled in your Lighting settings

Which you probably don't need

[quaint pecan]

I assume to rectify it I'll need to bake again now that that's off?

[ornate veldt]

why do my buildings have this weird shadow?

[novel stag]

whenever i bake my lighting, it comes out blocky ish. How do i fix this?

[lean whale]

Yep

[lean whale]

Is your lighting baked? Generate lightmap UVs enabled on the buildings import settings? Do you have reflection probes setup and baked as well?

[lean whale]

You can increase lightmap resolution, or if it's only like that in specific places you can select the meshes where it looks bad and bump up the "scale in lightmap" setting on the mesh renderer

[novel stag]

how do i increase the resolution

[lean whale]

Lighting > Lightmapping Settings > Lightmap Resolution

(if you're using bakery it's in bakery advanced settings I think)

[novel stag]

unfortuntaely i do not have that

[lean whale]

But based on your screenshot, the floor looks fine. So if the rest of your scene also looks fine I would just adjust the scale in lightmap setting for the ugly spots, instead of adjusting the entire resolution and wasting it on parts that already look good

Do not have what?

[novel stag]

i tried adjusting the scale and it still looked blocky

i dont have bakery

[lean whale]

Ah, well unity lightmapper works ok, just gotta tinker a bit more

What did you change the scale to? I think by default it's 0.5, I would probably set it to like 3 or 4 based on that pic

[novel stag]

it was set to 40 by default

[lean whale]

I mean the scale in lightmap setting

[novel stag]

i tried 3 - 5

didnt affect it at all

[lean whale]

Did you rebake after changing that?

[novel stag]

pretty sure

[lean whale]

Pretty sure as in yes? lol

[novel stag]

yea lmao

[lean whale]

Like you clicked generate and waited for all the lighting to be baked again?

[novel stag]

if this bake doesnt change anything, ill re do it

i set the resolution to ahem 1024

seems to be smoother

just worried about its size

[lean whale]

Erm, lightmap resolution (texels per unit) or lightmap size? Those are different things

[novel stag]

the resolution

i just foudn something interesting

[lean whale]

I think you mean size. 1024 is insanely high texels per unit

[novel stag]

so

i duplicated the light

and the light is so much smoother

duplicated is on right

[lean whale]

Probably because it isn't baked

[novel stag]

ah

well im doing the lightmap scale rn

i set it to 5 and the resolution back to 40

looks much worse now

[lean whale]

Lol well shit. Can you screenshot the mesh renderer settings and your lightmapping settings

[novel stag]

And i do have generate lightmap uvs on

[lean whale]

Was your lightmap size originally 1024?

[novel stag]

the resolution?

if so, then no

[novel stag]

uhhh idk

what should it be?

[lean whale]

I'm just asking if you touched that in like the last 5 min

[novel stag]

possiblyyyyyyy

no idea tbh

[lean whale]

Well. Hard to help if you don't even know if you are doing things or not

[novel stag]

i didnt even know that existed until now tbh, so im pretty sure it hasnt been touched

[lean whale]

Mkay, well that second screenshot you shared did look slightly better from what I can tell

[novel stag]

which one?

ive sent like 5 xD

[lean whale]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/534472776841691137/977059930722934804/unknown.png

[novel stag]

ah yea

but that was duplicated after a bake

[lean whale]

That looks better than this

I mean the baked one on the left though

[novel stag]

oh

[lean whale]

You can see that the lightmap is higher res

So to me that looks like increasing the scale in lightmap worked, unless that's not what you did, in which case I dunno what you did lol

[novel stag]

ill show u a rebaked version with the scale at 6, lightmap resolution at 1024, and texel size at 40

it just doesnt seem smooth on the edges

like you see on other worlds

[lean whale]

Are you setting the scale in lightmap on the object that contains the wall mesh?

[novel stag]

i set it on the sconce

[lean whale]

Nooo

On the wall

[novel stag]

ohhhh

im doing the wall rn lol

looks a tiny bit better

[lean whale]

You're basically telling Unity, hey give this wall more space on the lightmap so that the light can use more pixels to look smoother

[lean whale]

And make sure to decrease the sconce back to it's original value, so it's not wasting lightmap space

[novel stag]

why is the max scale value 3?

[lean whale]

But yeah the more you increase it the nicer that wall should look. And you can do that for any mesh that's receiving baked light (but if you're doing that to everything, you're better off just increasing overall lightmap resolution)

[novel stag]

like it says after i go past 3, that the max atlas size has been reached

[lean whale]

Because anything more than that would take a larger lightmap size than 1024

[novel stag]

oh ok

[lean whale]

Or for your mesh to be separated into smaller parts

That can each fit on 1024 lightmaps

[novel stag]

ah i see

[lean whale]

But generally you want fewer lightmaps

It's tedious but important to understand how these values all balance with each other. And unfortunately there's no one size fits all numbers to punch in, cuz it totally depends on the size of your scene, how many static objects there are and how much detail is required etc

[novel stag]

these realtime lights starting to look much better rn lol

ik they worse for performance but idk

[lean whale]

Yea honestly I used to be really intimidated by the lightmapping process cuz every time I tried it would just look all messed up and have like a dozen things to fix and tweak lol. But eventually I just dove in and got used to the process, now it's just a matter of going through the motions and I enjoy making it look nice

And fwiw Bakery is worth the money. Definitely not necessary but it just always looks better, I don't feel like I have to tweak things so much, and has less issues with glitchy seams or light leaking through cracks and stuff like that

[novel stag]

ah ok

just gotta save 55 dollars lmao

[novel stag]

so i tinkered with it and got pretty much how i want it

but now i just gotta figure out why it wont reflect

[novel stag]

can somebody help me with it ^?

[graceful tartan]

Have you got a reflection probe?

[novel stag]

yes

i have made some progress

although its weird

one side is darker than the other despite having the same amount of light on both sides

nvm im stupid

i had a point light hidden away

[crimson ice]

has anyone fixed this before?

here's how it looks like in unity

like why is it different in vrchat?

it doesnt make sense

[crimson ice]

:despair:

im beyond stumped lol

oh so it fixed on its own

im

speechless

[loud sonnet]

do i do the ligthing of the world in unity or while modelling in blender?

[pure widget]

unity

[loud sonnet]

thanks 🙂

Texturing is also done in unity or can it be done in blender?

[pure widget]

you can do it in blender bc you just end up importing the textures you make into unity in the end

blender is sort of your "showcase" with lighting and materials, but you have to set those things up in unity

if you're new, the pinned video in #world-development might help

[loud sonnet]

Thanks 🙂

[blissful violet]

This isn't lightmapped, but the first image looks lightmapped? Hmm...

Ive not encountered this issue before but the first thing id check is to make sure that your lights aren't too bright, and to check the texture assets created by the lightmapper if they are baked lights

[novel stag]

So im trying to bake my lighting but im stuck in an infinite preparing bake loop

so i figured it out

apparently having my VRCMirror on static, causes it to glitch

[stray crag]

I've been getting infinite baking too

Only Enlighten seems to work at all

[crimson ice]

i figured it out, dont move your pov in the scene, apparently it messes with the baking

[blissful violet]

Ah nice! I use Bakery so im not too familiar with the issues the default lightmapper has

[static flame]

new to vrchat world making; should i put a light on what is ideally light source in my map for baking or something else?

right now I have the default directional light and thats it

[tender crag]

Is it possible to disable this shifting point light reflection while using Bakery? I'm confused as to what causes it as I'm using baked light mesh type of sources primarily.

[hearty lagoon]

Doesn't that depend on how far away your light source is

[fallow lark]

yes you would want to put light sources where your lighting is for the baking

https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Other/Light-Baking

and if it helps here's a text tutorial on baking

[blazing stream]

that'd be "light map specular" in whatever shader your using, reason it does that is because you can only have one specular highlight generated from the directional lightmap and it will "jump" between the dominant direction in relation to your view point.

[tender crag]

Found it, thanks so much!

[drowsy violet]

Somehow the reflections in one of my worlds doesnt show up ingame, but it does inside unity editor

In Unity:

Ingame:

What am I doing wrong?

[rancid tulip]

Is that for Quest? The compression it uses on lightmaps cause that issue from what I've seen.

Is there a crunch compression that works on lightmaps and doesn't murder them? They all seem to REALLY destroy the quality.

[crimson ice]

nah pc

but i figured it out, thanks!

[dire crater]

What do y'all think about the lighting for my avatar world ?

In these images it's realtime but it looks essentially the same baked.

[blissful violet]

The first thing that jumps out at me is the floor spotlights being too bright, maybe tune the emissions and space them out more around the world so they don't need to be as bright?

[fluid mirage]

can someone tell my why when I try to bake only reflection probes, unity decides to instead bake lighting

I explicitly hit the "bake all reflection probes" button, but unity still says 'lmao no, im gonna set up for a light bake"

[twilit lily]

unless you used SH mode in bakery, it wont look the same. light sources dont show up in reflections

[rancid tulip]

Has anyone else had the issue wherein removing an object from the lightmap... doesn't? I end up having to duplicate the entire zone and deleting the original.

[drowsy violet]

My world isn't showing any reflections ingame. It does show them in Unity. Does anyone know what do? [SDK3]

[sleek ravine]

not sure if this is the right place but , i cant get my sky box to show in vrchat?

in vrchat my sky is blackniss

in unity this is what it looks like

[sleek ravine]

if you are on quest you need to setup relfection maps i belive

[drowsy violet]

im not on quest

[sleek ravine]

ooh i think then you just need standerd shaders tho i could be wrong? tho the reflection map might still be worth looking in to?

[graceful tartan]

Have you accidently tagged your reflection probes as editor only?

[drowsy violet]

a good thought, i checked that, but it's not what it is.

the reflection probes are set to untagged.

[graceful tartan]

Are they a child object of anything?

[drowsy violet]

the reflection probes are attached to the root of the scene, so not attached to any other object

[graceful tartan]

Hmm ok

[drowsy violet]

if I dont use any reflection probes it seems the environment reflections are being used properly

so the issue maybe is really about the reflection probes themselves

[graceful tartan]

What shader are you using on your world?

If not standard

[drowsy violet]

no shaders really, all materials are standard materials, im using a shader for the water, seanswater

you think the shader might break the other reflections?

here's two pictures. the one without the reflections in the windows is from ingame.

[graceful tartan]

Some shaders let you disable reflections for them is all

I wouldn't think the water should cause an issue

[drowsy violet]

im showing the reflection in unity on a higher intensity to show the contrast

its really strange never had that happen in any other world.

in the pictures above also, the water and the ship are using a different reflection. so i really just found out that the water is using the skybox reflection when there is no reflection probe affecting it.

but the ship uses a reflection probe and that one doesnt show up basically

the ship itself doesnt use any strange or unusual settings either

and this is the reflection probe

it's a real mystery

[graceful tartan]

Oh it's realtime?

Have you tried it baked?

[drowsy violet]

baked is a bit of a problem since it only shows the ship as the only static thing, the landscape is moving

so realtime is the only thing really to consider for me

but - by testing i noticed one thing now. I made a button to toggle the reflection on and off and noticed that it works when i toggle it on manually.

so maybe it creates the reflection on awake when basically nothing is rendered yet.

[graceful tartan]

Yea as it says on the probe at the bottom you need to trigger via a script

[drowsy violet]

https://tenor.com/view/oh-gif-4291207

xD

now i see

funny, i never needed to do it before, that's why i didnt notice but that makes sense now

[graceful tartan]

I've used a realtime one before once I think, and with the right settings I think it'll do it without a script to trigger it.
Depends on the refresh mode I think

Or maybe the slicing mode

Idk it's been a while

[drowsy violet]

oh okay. thanks so much for helping.

[fluid mirage]

my lighting comes out like this when I bake it. (using bakery) Why?

I have my bakery settings like so

and my direct light like so:

[hot sun]

How do I fix this lighting issue? I'm using poiyomi toon 7.

Nevermind I just fixed it.

Found the culling options.

[dire crater]

It looks essentially the same.. with the lowest lightmap settings

[lean whale]

That looks wayyyy different. Here is just one example of what Izu is talking about. Note that you also need to be using Bakery shaders (or other SH compatible shaders, I think someone made ones specific to VRchat) for SH mode to actually work

But also @twilit lily you can still get specular highlights from light sources in reflections without that, you just need to give the light source an actual 3D model with an emissive material for your reflection probe to see. Think about how real life works, light does not emit from an empty point in space, it emits from a physical object like a light bulb, and that's the object that gives the highlight we see in reflections. I use a free plugin to do this semi automatically https://github.com/zulubo/SpecularProbes

Either way I think your world looks pretty cool tho 🙂

[twilit lily]

thats why i said light sources. im aware of meshes, however they only used light sources, which wont show up in specular making it look rather flat

[dire crater]

I forgot to make that cylinder static. That's why it's black

I could care less about specular. It isn't used much in my world anyways

Also, I'm not using Bakery. I'm using the built in lightmapper.

[dire crater]

And yes, I know the lights are random. I just wanted to highlight some areas, no real thought was put into it

[bronze wigeon]

Im confused. I'm trying to light my world, and i get these weird black bars, and one couch isnt even lighting up. I have an area light above this space, and some small point lights in the lamps and im getting this weird effect. Im baking at 4096, at 200 Texels per unit, 5 bounces, and 16 samples.

[earnest mantle]

If I had to guess the UVs for your objects are overlapping

[bronze wigeon]

hmm, i dont have any errors for overlapping UV's

Oh, i do see some errors that say "mesh object_x on object possibly has incorrect UV's"

[earnest mantle]

ah could be that

Just double check they have generate lightmap uvs ticked on import

[bronze wigeon]

Ahh, ill do that and see if it fixes it

[bronze wigeon]

It worked. Thanks!

[earnest mantle]

np

[thick nymph]

How many times can you bake the lights? I did it twice and now one of my walls looks a shade brighter than the rest.

[rustic portal]

I thought all the scene's lighting is shared? (I could be wrong though!!) double check if said wall is static

[thick nymph]

Yes

And if I duplicate the wall, it goes back to matching everything else, but I don't want to have to keep duplicating everything, lol

I'll double check to make sure static is on.

[rustic portal]

Also check if they cast a shadow / receive a shadow etc

and if it's inside of the light probe zone

[thick nymph]

Should I remove the cast a shadow option?

[rustic portal]

You should most likely leave it on

maybe its just a side effect of your lighting

there's a lot of reasons a wall could be lighter than the others, sending some screenies could help a lot

[thick nymph]

I'll try to send some out after work.

[thick nymph]

This community has been super helpful in learning how to work with these programs. Thanks to everyone that's answered all of my questions!

[graceful tartan]

As many times as you want. It's not a cookie 🤭

Each time you bake it throws out the old data and goes again.

[verbal cape]

or should, there is a known bug where it refuses to replace the old or bakes over, darkening the scene in which case you delete the previous bake data prior. restart also work but deletion is faster.

[graceful tartan]

Strange but fair. I haven't had to deal with it since I use bakery.

[fluid mirage]

using bakery: all the lighting settings seem normal, yet my bake ends up blown out. yet only selectively. why?

these are my bakery/direct light settings

[graceful tartan]

Are all your objects set to static? Or at least all the things that are flowing white

[fluid mirage]

yes

[lean whale]

You've generated lightmap uvs for your meshes? And that direct light is your only active light source in the scene? Any ambient/environment lighting, if so can you post the settings? Any reflection probes, if so post the settings?

Also same question with postprocessing

Ambient lighting or reflection probes with too high intensity can cause stuff like this, or postprocessing with too much exposure or bloom etc

[fluid mirage]

only other lights are some point lights

reflection probes there's a few

no post

and yes I generated lightmaps for all meshes

some of the ground meshes are just straight up unity planes though

shader is standard

[lean whale]

Hmm ya everything you posted seems to be in order at least. Have you tried clearing the baked data before re-baking?

[fluid mirage]

I have. Im gonna try trimming down the scene and baking with more and more items, see if i cant pinpoint that way

[lean whale]

Yea I'm stumped. If you click on an object does the mesh renderer component have warnings or anything? Does the lightmap itself look blown out like that?

[thick nymph]

@rustic portal

First bake and everything is coming out super dark

Everything that is a static object has the static box checked off.

[naive spindle]

Hello, I have a problem, it turns out that I need to publish a map in about 5 hours, it is for a presentation of 40% of the Physics subject, I need to publish that map, but it won't let me because I am a new user, can someone help me posting it for me?****

[twilit lily]

why does it need to be public?

[earnest mantle]

If you only need it to run, you can install cyanemu to emulate it offline in the editor if that's an option

[floral fable]

Is it at all possible to use baked lighting in a world, and have a completely different set of baked lighting that you can switch to in game?

[hallow hound]

@fluid mirage do you useeny material with a high emision on bake that is in the map?

[fluid mirage]

No.

[graceful tartan]

What skea the reflection on your reflection probe look like?

[half dragon]

;-; I have been waiting 2-3 hours for my lights to bake even with my rtx card is it normal to take so long

Last time it took 6 hours and ended up like this

I am using bakery

[pure widget]

pinned has a video on lighting

[half dragon]

Oki

[lean whale]

Yeah definitely recommend that video- but to quickly answer your question, no that is not a normal amount of time for it take, unless you very purposely have crazy high settings which is totally unnecessary to achieve good looking results

[half dragon]

Hmmm okay could be my settings I'm only wanting to bake for quest

[half dragon]

I keep getting this error I have a rtx 3070 so idk why it keeps saying this after 4 hours in

[lean whale]

Did you do either of the things it is suggesting? And can you share the bake settings you are using?

[half dragon]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/917945771876319234/978137061531992094/unknown.png?width=197&height=671

[lean whale]

From your settings screenshot it looks like your tile size is too high. It's higher than your lightmap size which I don't think makes sense

[half dragon]

i did have the rtx mode on before tho

[half dragon]

is 5 to high should i set it to 2

[lean whale]

I'm talking about tile size. The slider at the bottom

[half dragon]

o is 2k fine then? my scene is really big tbh

[lean whale]

It will come out the same either way. Tile size is just how much bakery tries to create at once before moving onto the next tile, so setting that too high will strain your gpu

[half dragon]

but it doesn't it never uses 100% or all of the vram

[lean whale]

Maybe because your tile size is larger than your lightmap size which doesn't make sense and might be causing the error. Idk.

[half dragon]

mkay

[lean whale]

Try what I am telling you or don't lol

[half dragon]

i'll try it

[lean whale]

You might also try what the error message is suggesting since I'm assuming you did not

[half dragon]

i tried it again and it turned out like this....

[thick nymph]

I found a way to bake my lighting using emissions, but I still have darkened areas. Any suggestions on how to fix?

[static flame]

I dont usually mess with shaders, but what kind do I need to set up to turn a PC world into a quest compatible one without it looking like dog shit?

especially w/ lightmaps involved

[fallow lark]

switch your lightmap compression format to ASTC 4x4
as that should help the light Maps look less bad

[static flame]

was that directed at me or Hey-Zeus?

[fallow lark]

you

[static flame]

noted

Where would I find that setting?

[fallow lark]

the settings on the actual textures

so you like click on the light map and then texture settings would appear

[static flame]

I dont need to rebake anything from the PC version of the map and it’s shaders?

[fallow lark]

nope

[static flame]

huh, nice

as far as the materials for the ground and such, I assume all I really need to do is make it all part of the standard lite setup?

[fallow lark]

because the compression settings can be what mangles the light maps on Quest so rebaking wouldn't help with anything

[fallow lark]

yup

https://github.com/JordoVR/EasyQuestSwitch

[static flame]

ah, convenient

The map itself is only 20 or so materials so I didnt expect to really need to do much work

do you know where lightmaps are stored by default in unity?

the directory, that is

[fallow lark]

probably in a folder named after whatever the scene is called

[static flame]

thank you for your help

[fallow lark]

where you able to find them

[static flame]

I am not currently at my computer, I’m asking questions in advance so that I know what to do once I get home

worst comes to worse, I have everything organized really well

It wont be hard to find

[fallow lark]

cool

[novel stag]

Why is this happening?

my light probes are set and baked

the avatar shouldnt be appearing dark

[modest vapor]

Did you bake them ?

[novel stag]

yep

well then

i just checked my light probes

and

they arent there

wtf

[static flame]

two questions if you would oblige me

1: where are the compression settings? I dont see them.
2: Should I do this for both lightmaps and directional lightmaps, or just one or the other?

1:

[fallow lark]

yes that menu but on the Android tab

[static flame]

ooh

[fallow lark]

Android and Windows have slightly different compression formats

[static flame]

?

[fallow lark]

yes that's the setting you want to use

[hushed rivet]

does anyone know of a quest world shader that can do lightmapping as well as metallics/smoothness?

[fallow lark]

the standard light Shader?

[hushed rivet]

standard lite doesnt appear to accept lightmapping

[fallow lark]

have you set the objects to static

[lyric heart]

I believe Mochie, and Filamented work

[full mica]

Is it possible to crunch compress bakery lightmaps? I tried doing it via the texture import settings and it hella broke the lighting in my world

[modest vapor]

You can downscale them, but not crunch

[full mica]

Poop haha

Thank you anyway!

[hushed jetty]

bakery texel per unit x2

[magic agate]

how do you fix emissions not showing when light baking is done? its all dark:<

[graceful tartan]

Are they all set to static?

[magic agate]

yes

all of the light maps come out black

[graceful tartan]

What intensity are the emissives set at?

[magic agate]

its set to 2

i just opened the model in a new unity project and the emissions seem to generate but are choppy af

[lean whale]

Have you generated lightmap uvs for your meshes?

[magic agate]

this?

[lean whale]

Yeah hm looks like you're good

Not sure what's wrong but it might help to screenshot the settings on the emissive material as well as your lightmapping settings

[magic agate]

lightmapping is the scene lighting correct?

[magic agate]

yay i have no clue what i did but it works now:>

[lean whale]

Looks cool, is it gonna be like a sci-fi club space?

[magic agate]

no its just gonna be my home world haha

im also not high enough trust rank to put it out publicly

[lean whale]

Right on. It kinda reminds me of something I'm workin on haha

[magic agate]

oh wow that looks dope

do those light hoops move around?

[lean whale]

Yeah just a scrolling texture of stripes

[magic agate]

thats cool

[lean whale]

This asset has a buncha materials that do stuff like that https://github.com/AdultLink/TexturePanner

[magic agate]

woahhh

[lean whale]

I use it for a ton of stuff, if you just scroll down that page you can see all sorts of cool uses for it

[magic agate]

shit i thought i was done with that world now i wanna add more things

[lean whale]

I haven't used that asset in particular with VRchat but I think it should work fine

[magic agate]

ill give them a try some day i just came from blender donut and dont wanna burn my self out lol

[lean whale]

Good thinkin. Things can get outta control and overwhelming quick

[jovial veldt]

Hey y'all. I want to light up only this room with a singular blue light. As someone who's not really good with unity lights, can somebody help me out here?

Here's what the lighting is suppose to look like for reference (via the use of an emulator)

[rancid tulip]

Are you sure? From what I can tell, you CAN crunch them, but the quality will suffer quite significantly.

[rancid tulip]

As a test, find them in your assets folder, normally under "Bakery Lightmaps" and then enable crunch compression on them in the component window, you should notice their quality (and stated size) change visibly.

[full mica]

The picture I posted is with them all crunch compressed

The world is not supposed to be all black haha

Mind you I crunch compressed at 100, but lighting is very important for this world so any amount of quality reduction on the light maps I don't really want to do

[rancid tulip]

Yeah, you'll want to just leave them as is then. They compress quite well anyway.

[full mica]

They're about 50% of the size of my world at 2048 XD

[modest vapor]

Crunching them doesn't seem to do anything at all to the lightmaps that I've noticed, it actually broke them entirely for me a couple times

[rancid tulip]

I think you need to be running the newer GIT Bakery for it to work, it significantly shrunk them for me but murdered the quality so it wasn't worth it.

[modest vapor]

Yeah I can't imagine it being a good solution for anything, if it ends up with more artifacts and errors than just downscaling or baking at lower texels

[lean whale]

Assuming the world is one big mesh, I would separate the room as a new mesh and then put the room gameobject on a new layer. Then use the culling mask on other lights to exclude that layer

Light probes would probably have the same issue though, and can't use the same solution. Not sure what to do about probes

Or... maybe you can just build simple walls around it that block the other lights from leaking in, and then hide the walls with the culling mask on the camera

Or just disable them after baking even

[hushed jetty]

try to put it in static and bake the lights

[full mica]

Still trying to optimize my light baking with Bakery. I'm getting this awful looking lighting around edges/corners of things, I'm assuming from denoising. I'm baking at 64 samples with Denoise: fix bright edges enabled and I've tried setting backface GI to 1. The only thing that seems to improve it at all is increasing my texels per unit, but even at 300 it's only /just/ starting to look better, and the size of the lightmaps becomes insane. Is there anything else I can do? My lighting is a little complex but I don't think it's that absurd?

For reference, all the spot-lights in the ceiling have a bakery spot light as a child, the only other interior lighting here is the string light, doorway lights, ceiling light bars and then the ambient blue lights which are all bakery mesh lights. I have a direct light outside with low intensity and lower indirect, and a pink skylight with even lower values, those don't seem to make a difference when I play around with them though

[next owl]

artifacts around edges sounds more like a lightmap UVs issue to me than a denoise issue. maybe try increasing padding between shells a bit

[full mica]

I'll give that a go. Admittedly my knowledge about baking lighting is pretty minimal, most of it is just knowledge I took from rendering in cycles lmao which is not at all a real transfer of skills

[next owl]

texture baking of any kind always involves a bit of spill across uv seams, so you gotta make room for that inaccuracy

if your artifacts are mostly concentrated around corners, and your lightmap UVs are auto generated, then it's most likely the seams since the auto UV algorithm is going to try to slice UV seams where it finds corners

[modest vapor]

64 samples is very low too FYI

512 isn't too far fetched

[lean whale]

Yea I notice a lot of artifacts like that especially in areas like stairs and small bevels that are parts of larger surfaces. I try to avoid dealing with custom lightmap uvs so my solution has been to separate problematic faces into their own meshes so they can just be assigned more space in the lightmap (via scale in lightmap parameter on meshrenderer component if needed) without affecting anything else

I wonder if it'd be possible for Unity to add something like "minimum texel to face size ratio" to lightmap uv generation. So you could set it to say, 10, then it would see the face of a beveled edge that's under 10 texels wide and automatically separate and scale it. Seems like it could be handy but Idk about the technical black magic that goes on in that system lol

[full mica]

Any higher than that and bakery warns about running out of gpu memory

[modest vapor]

Just a warning

[full mica]

Lmao fair, I'll try cranking it in a sec here

[next owl]

if you isolate sections of your map into separate bakery sectors, you can chop up the problem into smaller chunks that your GPU can handle

of course you gotta be careful about how you design your sectors, and you could end up with many mb of lightmaps, but it might give you a bit more flexibility

[full mica]

I had to drop my tile size... And put a box fan in front of my PC lmao, but it seems to be fine with at least 256 samples

Lmao

It's significantly better at 256 though. 512 was taking foreeeeevverrrr, so I'm going to save it for my final bake and do it overnight lol. Thank you guys though! Padding and sample count both really helped a lot lol

I'm also going to separate my meshes into separate imports as well

[errant anchor]

help

using Bakery

[lean whale]

Have you generated lightmap uvs in the model's import settings?

[simple sinew]

why is my lighting all pixelated?

first image is baked, 2nd image is realtime

[errant anchor]

yes

I'll even show how messed up this is

[lean whale]

Ya that's messed up. I would double check to make absolutely sure you generated lightmap uvs for that specific mesh. Otherwise I dunno, maybe the object is set to a weird scale? That can mess with lightmaps sometimes

[errant anchor]

The size is 100 100 100 which is weird all other meshes are 1 1 1

so you were right thank you

[lean whale]

Hm did that fix it tho?

[errant anchor]

yes

[dry wadi]

Hi i like to know
Magic Light Probes works for VRC? > ||https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/magic-light-probes-157812||

Magic Light Probes with Bakery (GPU Lightmapper)
that works ?

[weak skiff]

Spyro uses vertex colors for lightning. If you can somehow rip those you'll be pretty much done with the lights

[verbal cape]

sure it works. You'll get an unrealistic, unmatched grid based layout with minimal effort if that is what you are aiming for.

[oak elbow]

You can get pretty good results using magic light probes. But, your lighting also needs to be good to get good results with any light probe tbf.

Also, if you use it to its fullest you lose a lot of the grid-like behaviour. But, it's still worse than manually placing them.

IT really isn't worth over manually placing them if you know how. Unless you're on a time constraint. But, it can be pretty time costly to get everything right. I did like 15+ iterations on every big room I have just to be satisfied.

[crude bison]

I know it's a common issue, but I can't remember where I used to see a solution for corners doing this:

[hot sun]

Hello. I already added a post process layer and settings that affect the bloom on certain objects in my world. How would I make a slider in-game that affects the world brightness? I can't add another post process layer onto my main camera.

[lean whale]

Could add some ambient occlusion to the lightmapping settings, basically makes all corners like that darker and the walls will fade to their current brightness from there. Not sure if that's specifically what are thinking of tho

[errant anchor]

baking lights makes me want to drink, my scene is pretty simple so I don't understand why.

I'm deleting my assets and re-importing clean so I will check back here in a bit to ask for help.

[lean whale]

Good luck. I used to hate lightmapping, but now it just feels like a matter of going through the motions, a bit tedious but no longer scary or difficult haha. The pinned video in this channel helped me a lot

[graceful tartan]

It's normally pretty simple. Import model. Make sure generate lightmaps is checked, set object as static, bake.

[lean whale]

The other day I learned you can use the preset manager in project settings to change default import settings to automatically generate lightmap uvs for models, went ahead and did that for all my projects. I'll probably still forget when I make new projects tho 😂

Still, there's just so much that can go wrong or make your lighting look incorrect or wonky and messed up. I used to be terrified of clicking that generate button lol. But it was just cause I hadn't taken a deep breath, sat down and went through the process, learning what all the settings do and why you would change them etc

[errant anchor]

I just want my world to look as intended with baked lights, the 4 triangles on one of the meshes is just black if hole filling is on and with it off makes it look weirdly lit

[jovial veldt]

I mean, I have Spyro World Editor but I don’t know how to like rip the textures.

Sucks that the place that I got the model from didn’t import the goddamn vertex colours, of all things.

[twilit lily]

that sounds like something is wrong with the mesh itself tbh, thats not really a lightprobe issue

wait, probes was someone else, crap

[dry wadi]

okay thank you for this explanation @verbal cape @oak elbow

[errant anchor]

is this data even used?

[modest vapor]

Yep

[errant anchor]

where

I change the size of ir to even see what changes and nothing does

[lean whale]

That is a directional lightmap, so you'd only see changes on materials which use normal maps and specular. Even then it is likely to be a subtle change (like the grain in a wood texture or cracks between bricks in a brick texture might look flatter). And I think depending on your directional mode and whether you're using bakery, you might need to use specific shaders to actually see the effect from this type of lightmap in the first place

[errant anchor]

I'll keep it because it's so small and I think my world size is only 3mb instead of 5 after banging my head against a wall for 6 hours

[lean whale]

Yeah, unless you're just using plain diffuse textures on everything without normal maps, it's good to bake directional to capture those subtle details. But if you are just using plain diffuse textures then it effectively does nothing and you can safely delete it/ might as well not bake it

Not 100% but pretty sure on that

[pearl tulip]

Hello. Does anyone know why Unity freezes everytime I try to bake the lighting? This is only happening when I am using "Progressive GPU" and I want to use that because with the "Progressive CPU" it takes way too long to bake.
It just says "Preparing Bake" and stays like that, I can only use task manager to close Unity.
I tried playing with the Lightmapping settings and changed all to the lowest possible values and it still didn't work. If you would have any ideas on why this is happening that would be really helpful, thanks.

[twilit lily]

maybe you set samples too high?

[pearl tulip]

i tried with them set to their lowest value

[next owl]

how much VRAM you got? you could be maxing out the card

unity's GPU lightmapper is also... fussy. bakery's is much more stable.

[lean whale]

Fussy is right lol. Mine was failing and falling back to Progressive CPU yesterday until I rebooted my pc. I'm guessing there was a background process using my GPU or something and fighting with Unity over it, but who knows really 😂

[blissful violet]

Unity is an enigma of bad programming and design decisions T _ T

[twilit lily]

+1 for bakery

a lot smoother and better results

and faster

[pearl tulip]

i got 6gb of VRAM

[next owl]

that's not a ton, depending on how complex your world is and how many samples you're throwing around

I'd try restarting Unity or your machine first and close out any other applications that might be using GPU memory, see if that helps. otherwise I'd recommend buying Bakery or falling back to the CPU lightmapper

[pearl tulip]

Yes I'll look into bakery and use CPU lightmapper in the meantime, thanks

[charred stag]

What's the difference between GPU and CPU lightmapping?

[runic pulsar]

Well

One runs on the CPU

One runs on the GPU

That’s pretty much all there is to it

It’s just determining what you want to use to process the lightmap

[next owl]

assuming you have the hardware for it, GPU lightmapping is about a bazillion times faster

generally you need an RTX-compatible card for the raytracing, and your available VRAM can bottleneck you if you don't have enough available for your scene + number of samples

[charred stag]

mk.

[runic pulsar]

lightmapping isnt raytracing...

[next owl]

yes i am aware of this

but GPU lightmappers like bakery leverage the raytracing functions of RTX cards in order to throw samples around your scene

it's not necessarily a requirement, i think? but the acceleration really helps

[fiery elk]

is there a reason why avatars using the toon lit shader look really dark in my world? i think it might be due to poor lighting but im not sure

[next owl]

are you using light probes?

[fiery elk]

no i'm just using light objects

should i be using light probes?

[next owl]

generally speaking you want to use baked lighting and light probes

if you're going to use real-time lights, you want to stick with as few as possible, preferably just one directional light if any at all

baked lighting requires light probes for the lighting to affect moving objects

[fiery elk]

how do i get baked lighting to work? whenever i try to use something like an area light that uses baked lighting it doesnt look like it works

[next owl]

https://youtu.be/dKgUJccjWRU

[fiery elk]

oh cool thx

[fiery elk]

ok so. that video was very confusing to me bc the person is using what looks like a different unity version, and i tried using light probes but it didn't work. i either did something wrong bc i dont understand the lighting or my world is still too dark. is there anything else that could be making the toon lit avatars so dark?

[fiery elk]

i've literally tried following multiple tutorials and my world still looks weird and toon lit avatars are almost pitch black. idk what im doing wrong but im very frustrated

[fallow lark]

https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Other/Light-Baking

[fiery elk]

i have done something, idk what, but somehow the toon lit avatars are a little lighter but still very dark

for some reason no matter how high i make the intensity or how big i make the range of the light i cant make them any brighter

[pure widget]

do u have light probes set up

set up light probes and then avatars should look normal

[fiery elk]

i do

but it's only got like. 8 or 9 thingies in it

should i add more of the dots to make avatars brighter?

[fallow lark]

where you place the probes matter as it's going to sample from the 3 closest probes

like if all of your light probes are in the shadows you're only going to get the shadow colors

[fiery elk]

oh

well. that might explain some things

[pure widget]

needs to be anywhere people are gonna be

mine isnt the best example but it gets the point across

[fiery elk]

so since i have little crystals jutting out of the corner of the room my world is in. and the light probes were in the corners inside the crystal mesh. that was probably casting shadows

[fallow lark]

you shouldn't have your light probes inside objects

as the objects themselves would be blocking all the light

[fiery elk]

omg. i added more probes and moved existing ones out of objects and the LIGHTING DID NOT CHANGE

im so frickin done with this

genuinely no idea how this works or what i'm doing wrong

[fallow lark]

do the lighting look normal when you test with a standard Shader

to make sure you're not just testing with a badly made Shader

[fiery elk]

the lighting on the avatar or the world?

[fallow lark]

a avatar with the standard Shader

[fiery elk]

i mean i can yeah but the problem is only with toon lit avatars

standard and standard lite look pretty much fine

[fallow lark]

myself I don't use toon shaders so I don't have much suggestions for that

[fiery elk]

damn

other toony shaders like poiyomi toon look fine

they actually look TOO bright

so i think the toon lit shader just sucks

[pearl tulip]

i think i fixed it? i had too many light probes i think, cause i deleted them and it worked and now i added just enough to cover what i needed and its baking with the GPU lightmapper

[rancid tulip]

How many did you have? I have scenes with over 12000 and it's fine lol

[pearl tulip]

Less than 12000 for sure xD but idk it just works since i reduced them so I'll take it

[fiery elk]

ok so update. i found out why the toon lit avatars were dark. it was literally just the environmental lighting. i just had to change the skybox

[hot moat]

hey everyone so i made some neon lights for my first world ever, I was just wondering if anyone can help me why my neon lights arent giving any light?

its just bright

[graceful tartan]

Did you bake the lighting?

[hot moat]

never mind i got it

just the lighting isnt what i need to be

[graceful jetty]

Is there a way to manually set the brightness of a lightprobe group?

For some reason, players are lit too brightly but the world looks fine.

[graceful tartan]

Player brightness would generally come from light probes not reflections.

[graceful jetty]

Whoops, mistyped

[graceful tartan]

Ahhh ok

[graceful jetty]

but yeah, when I adjust my lighting to make the world look right it's overblown on dynamic objects/players

[graceful tartan]

Is it just a specific area?

Could just be down to your light probe placement

[graceful jetty]

It's everywhere pretty much

[graceful tartan]

If you have a probe too close to a light source it might blow out users when they are pulling from that probe

[graceful jetty]

Things look good in shadows

but too bright most of the time

[graceful jetty]

I think the largest issue is that my sun light is set pretty high, but if I set it lower it looks wrong compared to the skybox

[graceful tartan]

Are you using unity or bakery for the baking?

[graceful jetty]

Bakery

[graceful tartan]

Have you tried using a bakery sky light? It has a button to match it's lighting to the scenes skybox

So should match exactly the sky's light

[graceful jetty]

Oh, I have one but it's not set to the skybox

let me try that

hm, that just made the shadows darker

[graceful tartan]

Got a screenshot of your scene and your light probe layout?

There's also a setting on the probe options somewhere to disable ringing, might help. Not sure exactly where it was though.

[graceful tartan]

I think on the probe group.

[graceful jetty]

?

oh, didn't see the other messages

[graceful tartan]

Read all the stuff. I just forgot to @ you at the start XD

Lol

[graceful jetty]

Here's the probe layout, one every 2m or so

@graceful tartan

Almost forgot to ping you too

[graceful tartan]

It is quite bright outside. 🤔 What does it look like on an Avi?

[graceful jetty]

For reference, this is on the dark side of the building where the details aren't blown out

[mint cipher]

What is the best way of lighting a building with this type of roof, everytime I use an area light it either doesn't cover everything or it leaks out and gets the outside terrain

[elder merlin]

Just real quick, do I need to convert lights to bakery's own or can I just use standard unity lights?

[full mica]

With how bright your world is that seems pretty accurate to me

[next owl]

add the bakery component to your existing lights and sync the values with the provided buttons. bakery doesn't consider standard lights at all when baking

[strong solar]

anyone know why i am on preparing bake for so long?

[strong solar]

what??? why is it incompatible it was working

[graceful jetty]

In that case, do you know any awful hacky ways I can adjust it manually?

Because I've tried setting the lights so that avatars look good and the world looks too dim

[lean whale]

Did you duplicate the scene recently? It might be still referencing the lighting data from the previous scene. Try clearing the baked data first (drop-down arrow next to the generate button) and if that doesn't work just delete the lighting data (which should be in a folder with the same name as the scene)

[strong solar]

no duplication??

but ill try that thanks

[lean whale]

I dunno then, that's what usually messes it up for me cause I'm always duplicating scenes to make backups before I try new assets and break everything lol

But yea doing those things should help either way

[full mica]

I'm actually pretty sure there's a bakery utility that just does this for you for all your lights

[full mica]

Not that I know of :/. I'm sure it's possible to do via an in editor script but I've never done anything like that before

[full mica]

Huh.... I could've sworn there was but I'm looking at my project now and I don't see anything to do that

[smoky wharf]

Is it possible to swap between baked lightmaps in runtime?

[modest vapor]

Nope

Can swap meshes though !

[graceful tartan]

Tbh that brightness looks about right for the brightness outside

Two ways to fix it I can think of is add post processing with a little colour balance to bring down the high end brightness

Or to turn down the brightness of that external light, and in your bakery settings turn up the indirect intensity so you don't lose out on the light brightness inside the room

[modern mantle]

Anyone have a guide for lighting massive scenes? Bakery is flipping out. I do have the scene set up in such a way that I can theoretically separate the "skybox" from the "play area", but I don't see a method for having two different lightmaps beyond making two separate scenes, which probably isn't supported by VRC.

[next owl]

look up bakery sectors

if your skybox is truly that large, consider using a "virtual skybox" or whatever it's called... basically make your skybox environment 1:100 scale and far away from the main scene, and render it with a separate camera that matches the orientation of the mainCamera but moves at that same 1:100 scale

that camera outputs to a different layer behind the layers rendered by the mainCamera, that acts as the "skybox"

[modern mantle]

Okay, I was asking about that yesterday but was told it wasn't possible in VRC

[next owl]

i've seen it done in some test worlds but i don't know how high fidelity you can get that texture to work, and i am not positive it will work well with quest

[modern mantle]

The small friend group this map is intended for isn't going to have a ton of quest users.

[fallow lark]

question couldn't you just shrink the the background for the baking and then put it back to its normal size instead of trying to deal with virtual Skybox shenanigans

[next owl]

or just reduce the texel density of the far background geometry, you can have separate bake settings if you place that stuff in a different bakery sector

i dunno exactly how huge his background is but using 3D skyboxes seems to be the usual way to get that sense of scale without having to deal with the other problems of an enormous scene bounding box

https://ask.vrchat.com/t/multi-camera-effects-in-vrchat/2964/4
this guy seems to have gotten around the technical limitation of camera layers getting overridden by the VRCSDK by using an udon script to set the camera layers after the fact

[fallow lark]

question wouldn't having multiple cameras like that be worse for performance than dealing with the background normally because now you're having to render all of those cameras pixels in addition to your normal pixels

[next owl]

it's not something i'd recommend doing unless the scales you're dealing with are truly huge

but for big enough environments it's the better choice

HL2 used this trick extensively to keep scene bounding boxes within a reasonable scale

[modern mantle]

Yeah, I used to make Hammer maps so I'm used to having 3D skybox availability

[fallow lark]

but that's also a different engine so I'm not sure if that's actually much of a helpful Factor scene bounding boxes

[modern mantle]

As for map size: it's 5km by 5km scenery, and 200mx200m play area (although I plan on having private room teleports around the map like that one voxel world)

[next owl]

gigantic bounding boxes means floating point precision errors and huge camera clip distances, which lend themselves to Z-fighting and other potential artifacts

that's not unique to the source engine, unity suffers from the same thing

[modern mantle]

I know of a way around the floating point errors.

[fallow lark]

I guess a question would be is any of the background scenery able to be flattened into like 2D cutouts

so they don't need to be as far away

[modern mantle]

Fog doesn't work well on close objects so I'd have to render externally in Blender, or just make it work in Unity.

Right now the map is a mere 21MB in size

[worthy crater]

Are bakery adapters still needed for SH lightmaps in VRC?

[jade burrow]

Anyone know what's going on here?

[modern mantle]

Now I just need to figure out how to get rid of ambient lighting.

[lean whale]

I don't think bakery really uses ambient lighting? You either use a sky light component with a skybox for skybox lighting, or you have to make 6 directional lights in all directions to simulate what Unity's non-skybox environment lighting does

Or if it's unity's environment lighting that you want to get rid of, you can just set it to color and set the color to black

[modern mantle]

This should all be pitch black, beyond the spotlit areas.

And Environmental Lighting is set to black.

[lean whale]

Ah hm, could it be the indirect lighting from those spotlights then? I think you'd need to set them all to zero if they aren't already

Or else yeah seems some light is leaking in from somewhere or something, not sure... are you using a skylight as well?

[jade burrow]

poke ^^

[modern mantle]

I was, but it's disabled.

[lean whale]

Hmm so is indirect intensity on the spotlights set to 0?

[modern mantle]

Yep

[lean whale]

Dang ya I dunno then. Is the material reflective or metallic at all?

[modern mantle]

Just your basic UModeller box tiles.

So not as far as I can tell

[lean whale]

Can you share your full bakery settings, mebbe something is weird there

[modern mantle]

Lighting menu:

[lean whale]

I wonder if this is your problem

[modern mantle]

Once this bake is done, I'll try that.

Nope

I figured it out.

I forgot to add reflection probes

[full mica]

...That is insanely smart holy fuck lol

I could've used that on my old world

[next owl]

it's a pretty cool trick, i didn't know about it until someone asked me if i'd considered it for my own world. i had no idea what they were talking about so they took me on a tour of some worlds that used it

it's pretty great at conveying very large landscapes

[full mica]

I'll have to keep that in mind for if I ever start up work on my old world again haha, thanks for the tip

[lean whale]

Huh that fixed it? I don't understand, why would reflection probes change that?

[modern mantle]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[lean whale]

Glad it's good now but super curious

Is the material indeed reflective then?

[modern mantle]

No, it's matte.

It was even doing that with Default-Material.

[lean whale]

It can appear matte but still have reflections enabled, which can affect the appearance

[dense elbow]

having some issue with lighting https://github.com/BananaBread291/Thunderstorm_Prefab so when the lighting flashes it is affecting avatars through the walls red hair is normal black hair is the light for the lighting turning on

[jade burrow]

What do I need to change for this to not do this anymore?

[modest vapor]

Sounds like a shader issue ?

[modest vapor]

How many realtime lights do you have

[jade burrow]

How do I check? ^^'

[modest vapor]

Do you know how many lights you have in your scene ?

[jade burrow]

8 spotlight things, 1 laser, 1 discoball, 1 color discoball thing, and stuff that has omission lights

The floor is reacting to the colors of the spotlights tho

[modest vapor]

Check those individual lights components to see what they're set to, if realtime or not

[jade burrow]

Lemme see

[jade burrow]

Realtime yes

[modest vapor]

You can only have a few realtime lights active at once before they start disabling each other depending on where you look

If those spotlights are static, they need to be baked

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKgUJccjWRU

[jade burrow]

That’s not the problem, they work. It’s the floor flashing the colors.

[modest vapor]

What shaders are you using ?

And what happens when you have a single light enabled in the world

[jade burrow]

I’ll test

Doesn’t do it with just 1. Too many? But why only on those 2 pieces?

[rancid tulip]

Why can't I set this object to receive light from lightprobes? (it's not static, hence it needs to use lightprobes)

[lean whale]

Did you bake it previously, and then uncheck static without clearing baked data? I think in that case it is still attached to the lighting data and present in the lightmap so unity still treats it as static

[rancid tulip]

I was worried that may be the case. I didn't want to clean all as I'll need to rebake 9 entire areas if I do that 😦

[lean whale]

In that case you can probably just duplicate it and maybe delete the original (although Idk if deleting the original might mess up the lightmap, so maybe only disable it instead lol)

[rancid tulip]

Would that cause any potential issues with scripts or anything?

[lean whale]

If you have any other objects which reference the door, you need them to reference the new copy of it. But if it's only connected to its own scripts it should be fine

[rancid tulip]

Hmm, I cleared, rebaked this area and they are still scuffed and still don't let me enable probes.

[lean whale]

How are you clearing it? Also I think I recall you're using bakery with sectors right? I don't have experience with sectors so it might be specific to that. Def wanna make sure you're clearing the correct data for example

But if you don't want to rebake did you try duplicating instead?

[rancid tulip]

Via Clear Baked Data under Lighting.

[lean whale]

Right... so I think we ended up at this point in a previous conversation. Basically I assume that might not actually be doing anything because you're using bakery, but you also don't want to clear it through the bakery menu because then you'll have to rebake more stuff correct? Because I'm pretty sure that's what the deal is

In which case, I do think just duplicating the doors would be a better option. And if you have references just take the time to go through and set them again. Unless that would take more time than rebaking everything lol

Or it could be a sector thing that I don't really know about. Or something else weird is going on

[rancid tulip]

Ill try clearing through the Bakery menu too for for the sake of testing.

[lean whale]

🤞

[austere coral]

idk why im getting this and also am using Bakery for Generating Lightmaps
Small Black Bars in the door ways.
Reply to Me for Answering & Thankies for the Help

[dense elbow]

well it like lights up all avatars in the world

[rancid tulip]

That worked. So the key is asking Bakery to clear, not the normal lightmap system.

[modest vapor]

Oh, if you want the prefab to not affect players, you just need to remove the PlayerLocal and Player layers from the light component

[dense elbow]

thanks ill look in the morning

[graceful tartan]

It's an ooold technique, its how the source engine works.

[graceful tartan]

When there are no reflection probes it takes it from the skybox or general enviroment light or something like that. Not sure the specific but adding a reflection probe always resolves it.

[twilit lily]

maybe your faces are too complex? try creating your own UV Map and disable "generate lightmap UV"

you can check with the checker preview in bakery if its a complex face thing

[austere coral]

TBH I'm not seeing anything wrong. It looks fine to me?

[next owl]

do those pillars have softened vertex normals or something? those same areas turning dark look a little different even in your checkerboard view

it looks like a topology problem

[austere coral]

Hmm i'm not sure why tbh I Started Using Probuilder in unity for World Creation since i never knew it existed before & Its way better xD

[austere coral]

Ok So I realized that the way I added the doorways was i used loop cuts and then extruded the walls down then up in which id then remove the faces i didnt need and i forgot to remove the floor meshes xD

But it seems that the black bars are gone but they correlate to the way how light bounces between 2 different meshes or close in proximity

[twilit lily]

there is a cut in the checker preview, its most likely a mesh issue. ideally you only want triangles and squares as shapes

[austere coral]

Previews for what i have rn and LOL the Floor I'll see how it would be if i add floors to only the rooms or if i am able to stop that in some way without editing

[barren crater]

Does the VRC Standard lite support bakery RNM and SH directional modes?

I saw there was RNM fields in the debug view

[modest vapor]

You would need Merlin's SH conversion tool to use it

[barren crater]

of course, but that's cool that it does work

[static flame]

is there a reason lights dont affect the top part here?

[lunar narwhal]

what does the scene look like

baked lighting?

[static flame]

baked

[lunar narwhal]

i'm guessing the whole thing is a single mesh

so the only thing that comes to mind is that those walls up there are probably backfaces?

[static flame]

with a bunch of different parts, yes

and they are not backfaces

[lunar narwhal]

is the wall up there a separate mesh?

[static flame]

the entire map was inverted when i put it in blender, so i pressed A and then inverted it all

[static flame]

yes

ratrace.003

[lunar narwhal]

can you show the mesh renderer settings for that

[static flame]

accidentally pressed v twice

its the exact same image

[lunar narwhal]

well, i don't see the baked lightmap under lightmapping for that mesh which is odd

this is after a bake?

[static flame]

I believe I cleared bake data but it looked the exact same

its 4 lights so I can bake it rq if you want

[lunar narwhal]

I should add, theres no reason to keep your walls as seperate meshes, seeing how low poly they are

[static flame]

I need to keep some things as different settings and it's much easier to keep them different

theres only 16 of them

its a Halo CE port

baked

[lunar narwhal]

the only thing that really comes to mind is those are backfaces

does mochie standard cull back faces by default ?

[hallow hound]

It cant be low range of the light?

[lunar narwhal]

the light seems to be hitting the other surfaces further away though?

unless i'm looking at that screenshot wrong because of the angle

[static flame]

I am 10000% sure they arent backfaces

[static flame]

this is correct

not backfaces, though its hard to tell from the image

[lunar narwhal]

what does the mesh renderer component for that wall look like now

[lunar narwhal]

whats your lightmapping settings

[lunar narwhal]

can you show the mesh renderer for the ceiling that baked

[lunar narwhal]

huh, i would normally expect to see a baked lightmap slot under lightmapping

but that aside i'd guess its because of the message on your other meshes saying the object's size has reached maximum size in lightmaps atlas

[static flame]

hmm

ok, how do I fix that? Scale the lightmap down?

[lunar narwhal]

I wonder if its because of your scaling? your meshes seem to have a scale of 100

[static flame]

oooh

huh

you are right, it does

scale on the whole thing is 1 though

wacky...

[lunar narwhal]

i'd try reexporting with https://nyanpa.su/i/py9E2Ahl.jpg

[static flame]

it's on All Local by default

FBX All changes what?

[lunar narwhal]

I am not entirely certain to what the setting entails on a technical level, but I know that one of the reason's its done is to get the scaling when exporting fbx's to match that in unity

[static flame]

ok now everything is actually at a scale of 100

set it all to 1

scale is correct

rebaking

same result

wait nvm

oh dammit

I'm getting that issue where it's stuck on "preparing bake" forever

trying again with lower settings

[lunar narwhal]

are you not able to use the gpu lightmapper?

[static flame]

it reverts back to CPU whenever I press bake

[lunar narwhal]

what gpu do you have?

[static flame]

3080 12gb

in other words, I shouldnt be having problems

[lunar narwhal]

for 2048 lightmaps and lower yeah

[static flame]

I'm still getting the issue at these settings

lemme try 512 for fun

[lunar narwhal]

there should be a warning in console telling you the reason it falls back to cpu

[static flame]

lemme get rid of blender and vrchat rq

same result

wacky

[static flame]

^forgot to check off generate lightmap UVs

still doesnt fix it

:/

[lunar narwhal]

no clue then, if the message about exceeding lightmap atlas is still there maybe try lowering the lightmap scale on all your meshes, but other than that i'm out of ideas

[static flame]

hmm

one sec, I have an idea

my idea did not work

ok what the fuck

are they backfaces???

I'm so confused

if i flip the faces in Blender then everything is see-through

backface culling (as you can see, the lights are opposite ways of where the mesh is showing)

frontface culling

if I just turn culling off, it still does the same thing

wacky...

[lunar narwhal]

so they are back faces after all?

[static flame]

no??

[lunar narwhal]

regardless, you could try creating a lightmap parameter setting and set backface tolerance to 0 and see if that helps

[static flame]

alright, how do I do that? where is the lighmap parameter settings?

I dont see it in the lighting tab

[lunar narwhal]

https://nyanpa.su/i/Fb5N2AjU.jpg

hit create new

[static flame]

set backface tolerance to 1?

or 0?

0, right, per your message above

[lunar narwhal]

0

[static flame]

sorry

thanks

ok

uhh

does this help in the viewport or just when baking?

[lunar narwhal]

when baking

[prisma tree]

Hi, anyone can help me with something?

[rotund ibex]

There are some gnarly seams or something

How can I fix them?

[raven blaze]

question... so I've created this scene in Blender which uses emissive materials to light it up.. but how do I get them to cast light in Unity to then bake them? does anyone maybe have a tutorial?

[twilit lily]

in unity enable the emissive checkbox on the material and either select your color and strength or the emissive map, depending on what you used. Unity automatically lights up emissive materials when baking

[raven blaze]

I'll be giving that a go, thank you so much! ^^

[rancid tulip]

Can you make light probes specific to an area? I have probe groups inside hierarchies that get enabled and disabled for different places, but every time I bake probes for a zone, all the previous ones seem to be lost and only the new ones saved and affect anything.

[mint cipher]

Are there any Window Volumetric Prefabs that are public?

[winter garnet]

Is the only way of doing baked light Day and Night switches duplicating the baked geometry and animating it? Or is there a better way?

[modest vapor]

Or teleporting the player, because lightprobes can't be changed at runtime, so players will be lit incorrectly

[winter garnet]

Hmm didn't know that! That makes sense yeah.

Thanks!

[rancid tulip]

Is there any way of baking lightprobes in groups, or some other "not all at once" method? It seems like there should be, but I'm not finding anything.

[modest vapor]

Sadly there's no method, but I'm trying to convince engineers for one

[rancid tulip]

I've been splitting up my "zones" using Bakery's sectors which is great for baking, but not being able to do the same with lightprobes feels like it renders the whole thing useless because no dynamic objects (or players) will have any lighting... seems like a weirdly serious oversight.

[modest vapor]

It's less of an oversight and more of not wanting to rely on third party tools to do that. We'd need our own implementation, which udon might let us do in the hopefully near future

[rancid tulip]

I'm more surprised that Unity has no native way to handle it, but I guess in native Unity you're expected to use different / additive scenes.

[quasi hedge]

Blendable Baked Lighting States :SmileySticker:

[fallow lark]

yeah the way vrchat handle it was probably not what Unity was having in mind as they were probably thinking shipping commercial titles. not user-generated content Bonanza

[quasi hedge]

Curse this server + it's blocking of my smiley sticker

[rancid tulip]

I mean, having areas disabled/enabled on the fly isn't a VRC specific thing, but it breaks light probe baking.

[tranquil vine]

I'm trying to start out making a world and have a couple of questions:

• the shadow being cast by this wall only starts from halfway along its side and i don't understand why it's not being drawn from the front corner
• my postprocessing effects won't apply until i hit play and i want to see them in the viewport

[lean whale]

Is the wall maybe floating above the floor slightly? And do you have multiple cameras in your scene, and is the one with postprocessing tagged MainCamera?

[tranquil vine]

it appears to be floating but it's just an illusion and the floor and wall do actually intersect
and i only have one camera; the vrcworld reference camera is set to the main camera, the postprocessing object is tagged to the main camera, the postprocessing layer is a component of the main camera and the postprocessing volume is global 🥴

[lean whale]

Oh, click this pesky lil guy

But ya the wall. Hmm I dunno

[tranquil vine]

thank you

[lean whale]

I've lost so many hours after accidentally clicking those damn little buttons. Like "WTF IS WRONG WITH MY LIGHTING GAHHH"

[tranquil vine]

haha

I wanted to make some ceiling lights so i made a cylinder and assigned a strong emissive material
from what i observed am i right to assume that emissive materials don't really output a lot of light?

i cranked up the intensity as much as i could and it looked like none of the surroundings changed

[lean whale]

Emissive materials only cast light on their surroundings if they are baked into lightmaps/light probes

If you haven't baked lighting before, the pinned video in this channel is a great tutorial. But it is a whole process to learn and manage as you design your scene, not just a quick checkbox to tick or whatever

But ya without baking emissive, it will only brighten the object it's on

[tranquil vine]

Alright thank you

Alas

[static flame]

any fix for the eternal "preparing bake" bug in the lighting tab, besides buying Bakery?

[mint cipher]

Trying to bake lighting

Anyone have any clue what's causing this?

[graceful tartan]

So you have generate lightmaps UVs chrck on the models import settings?

[mint cipher]

Did, on all my models, for some reason it still does it,

I removed the flipped normals, and just thickened them in blender using the solidify tool, but-

Now I get errors like this

[modern mantle]

FINALLY figured out what was wrong with my lighting: Bakery's area light is just broken. Replaced it with a series of point lights and it came out beautiful.

Now back to figuring out WTF is wrong with my mirror buttons in VR.

[dim folio]

Hi I have a bit of an Issue regarding the lighting of my objects in my world

This was the last build of my world

and this is the current project in unity

for some reason the objects seemed to appear more grey now, and i've found out its due to the reflection probe in the center of the room, which was also there in the last build. does anyone know what I might have accidentally done?

also this is what it looks like when I set my light's emission's GI from baked to none (its my only light source), i'm really not sure what I did wrong here.

[graceful tartan]

Are all the toys pickups or static objects?

[dim folio]

pickups

I initially thought that might have had something to do with it, but the shelf and tables and parts of the bed, which are static and contribute to GI, are also behaving weirdly

[graceful tartan]

have you got lightprobes set up for the room? thats where they would get most of their lighting from

[dim folio]

Yup I do

could those be the issue?

[graceful tartan]

In the first pic it looks like theres a light probe near to the orange emission which is giving that orange tint on the higher objects