archived-lighting

[thorny goblet]

What is causing this square?

in the floor

[drifting panther]

check the ceiling for any colliders that could possibly be causing this shadow

[wary whale]

why is Unreal lightning better than unity? what makes it more beautiful?

can i have similar results on unity URP?

[mellow sierra]

Unreal has lighting set up for you out of the box. Unity is more or less a blank slate (in other ways as well). You have to do the work to make it look nice.

[upper fable]

So yes you can but its harder than with unreal

[wary whale]

is there any tutorial to get similar results to unreal default state?

like post processing values, etc

[mellow sierra]

Have a look and let us know

[thorny goblet]

Its not any collider

it looks liek a glitch

with any type of lighting i use

[limber delta]

I'd create a test scene and bring your assets in one by one and see if the error is happening in that scene as well.

[thorny goblet]

ok

[thorn flower]

starting my prototype from blank project again, my terrain is looking way too bright 🤔 some googles are recommending i make sure Lighting is set to Linear not Gamma

However - i'm trying to build for Android, and there was this warning message that Linear is not supported which is why i switched it to gamma

any advice? what should be fixed; the Lighting Linear/Gamma, or something else to bring the brightness down to normal levels

"burning my eyes" kinda bright (this is terrain with sand texture and some blotches of grass texture)

[serene jasper]

so guys, i have direction light in my scene which is set to mixed and i baked my light into lightmap which i can see in the scene view that the light is baked, but 1.) the light kinda looks different than the baked one? 2.) it disappears as soon as the light is turned off, which should not happen as the light is baked into a lightmap for static objects, or am i completely missing something here?

i also watched an hour long unity explanation on baking lights and i got all my info from there as well and i am doing exactly same but doesnt seem to work i guess

and here you can see it goes out when i disable light when technically it should still be there cause it is all baked into the lightmap textures?

[eternal pasture]

Why do these artifact spots appear when baking light using the CPU? How to fix it?

P.S. There are no artifacts when baking light using the GPU, but I have a weak GPU and I need to bake using the CPU.

[little condor]

That's the correct behaviour. With mixed lighting on the directional light, Unity is aware that the light might move in the scene so it doesn't bake the shadows created by your static objects. Instead it appears to create a sort of ambient/global illumination map and then the directional shadows cast by objects are applied in real-time.

If you bake with the light set to Bake, then the shadows won't disappear when you turn the light off.

[deft fiber]

See if texel validity debug view mode reveals issues (and check lightmap UV overlap for good measure)
CPU or GPU shouldn't make a difference with texel invalidity, but that's what it looks like and it's always a good place to start

[eternal pasture]

Thank you so much for the advice! Texel Validity does highlight this part of the model in red, but I checked that the normals are facing in the right direction (outwards). What could be the problem and how can I fix it?

[deft fiber]

Texel invalidity happens when normals are inverted or in close proximity or in sight of inverted normals
https://forum.unity.com/threads/faq-blocky-artifacts-appear-when-i-bake-a-scene-how-can-i-fix-them.951444/
Using Blender's "face orientation" overlay will give you a clearer picture of if the mesh has inverted faces, but it's also possible that the faces are inverted somewhere else close by

[spice spade]

anyone know my lightmaps are grey like this : (

[timber lichen]

lightmap baking is always stuck at global illumination baking 0%

[strange elk]

Im making a 3d space simulation using urp, where i would like light not to decrease its intensity over range.
(pic 1 = what i dont want)
(pic 2 = what i do want)
Tnx guys

[chilly kettle]

i googled a little and found this.
Not sure if it does its job
https://github.com/alexismorin/Falloff-Customizer

But what you want is to change the Falloff of the Unity light

[strange elk]

Thank you

[thorny goblet]

I think i found the problem, the lights are stacked on each other, so they are attempting to light the same area, which is causing the artifacts.

now im kinda at lost though, im not sure how to only use 1 light and manage to make realistic lighting from the windows

Nevermind fixing the range fixes it

[loud prism]

I'm trying to make lighting assets for Tabletop Simulator.
I found a working example that doesn't fit my needs but has a nice flicker I want to copy.
I used a C# script I found to get the effect I was looking for but once turned into asset bundle for Tabletop Simulator I lose the effect, I'm told scripts like this don't work with the asset bundles.
Anyone familiar with this problem and can point me in the right direction?

[bright rune]

Hi there
Whats the best way to get a capsule like light for a lightsaber?

[chilly kettle]

Emissive Material and Bloom Post Processing i think

[oak dawn]

couldn't have said it better

[oak dawn]

also use a point light if you need light

[bright rune]

but that makes it inconsistent and if the saber cuts into an object the light is gone

[oak dawn]

isn't that realistic?

[bright rune]

if it cuts past the middle everythigns gone

[oak dawn]

i'm saying you should make the saber's material emissive (add bloom for better looks) and attach a point light to the saber (just saying since you may have understood what i said wrong)

[bright rune]

already tried it tho and it wasnt the best

[oak dawn]

looks good to me though

[bright rune]

it doesnt add light to the plane under it

its just bloom

[oak dawn]

i added a point light to the saber

so it does

if you mix bloom with a point light it looks great

[ashen mesa]

why does this arm look dark for no reason

[full wyvern]

I think you could comment some of your shader to decide which code result in this issue.

[deft fiber]

If the normals seem correct in the modeling software, it's also possible that incorrect or unapplied bone transforms can flip the shading like that

[shadow sequoia]

how in the world do i add the urp 2d renderer

[thorn flower]

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-materials/sky/fantasy-skybox-free-18353#content
what is the difference between cubemap vs. panoramic skybox? and how to know which one to choose

[deft fiber]

Cubemap has 6 separate images for each direction, panoramic skybox is one image that's distorted like this

https://docs.unity3d.com/uploads/Main/skybox-lat-long-layout.png

[thorn flower]

@deft fiber so is it like... more performant to use Panoramic skybox, or something?

how to know which one to choose, if choice is an option

[deft fiber]

They might be smaller in size but show more distortion with high-detail skies, but I don't know for sure

[thorn flower]

in this particular asset i can't notice much difference

[deft fiber]

I'd use cubemaps but that's just because I'm familiar with those
I doubt it'll make much of a difference

If you've got both at hand you could compare the sizes to verify if I'm on the right track about that

[thorn flower]

@deft fiber looks like the panoramic image is 2048 x 1024, whereas each of the 6 images for the cubemap is 1024x1024 each

[deft fiber]

It'd be a smaller by a long shot, which is good if you can't notice a big difference

[thorn flower]

i see, so in this case the panoramic might indeed be kinda more performant than the cubemap?

[deft fiber]

In this case yes, though a more empirical comparison would be the 2k*1k panorama versus a 512*6 cubemap

[thorn flower]

right

this is also for a mobile app, so on smaller screens i think any difference if any is much less noticeable

[upper fable]

More cascades, smaller shadow distance

[random sleet]

exactly it, thank you

How heavy is this for mobile?

[upper fable]

Usually all realtime lighting is avoided on mobile games, just precalculated lighting

[random sleet]

Just need it for 1 character.

How heavy is the 1 cascade and 4 distance?

[deft fiber]

This depends entirely on the scene, the character, shadow resolution, whatnot
Only you can aswer that question by testing and profiling performance

[random sleet]

Yes I understand but I'm asking specifically about the cascade and distance . Is it more performant to have less or more?

[deft fiber]

Bigger distance means more meshes must be rendered for shadow casting, but bigger distance isn't more expensive to render by itself, it just stretches the shadow resolution thinner
Cascades are about a tradeoff
There's a (more or less) small performance overhead for each cascade, but what cascades do is concentrate higher resolutions closer to camera where you're more likely to need the pixels, while reducing relative resolution for cascades further away

[random sleet]

Thank mate

[fiery current]

[Quesion | URP | Ambient Lighting]

I'm following the learn.unity.com creative core pathway. We are just getting into lighting and learning about ambient lighting.

I have a scene with no lights, and am playing with Lighting -> Environment -> Ambient Color. As I make the color brighter, the scene gets brighter.

I'm confused about this comment in the courseware: "Note: GameObjects need to be flagged as Static to be included in the lightmap for ambient lighting. This is because lightmap data is precalculated and can only be calculated for GameObjects that don’t move at runtime. You’ll learn more about this when you bake lighting for this scene."

I seem to be able to change the amount of ambient light by making the Ambient Color brighter, without ever setting any objects to static. So I'm confused about the comment.

[fiery current]

Nevermind, I think I have a better handle on it now. It was useful to google "how to get a completely dark scene".

[strange elk]

Can someone pls help.
I want to implement that light won lose its intensity over distance.
While searching I only found https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProgressiveLightmapper-CustomFallOff.html
and I have 0 idea how do I implement it.
Any suggestions ???
I'm fairly new to Unity so I'm still learning to use documentation
Edit: I use realtime lighting in urp

[deft fiber]

That's only for baked lightmapping
For realtime you'd use some solution like this
<#archived-lighting message>

I don't know if that's for URP but if it isn't you'll have to find something else

...Or a shader for each material which uses custom lighting

[fiery current]

I wouldn't normally ask this here, but it takes so damn long to bake the lights I feel like I need someone to point me in the right direction: When I flip all of my point lights to "baked" from "realtime", and then bake, the scene looks dramatically darker. Not sure what I am doing wrong, any thoughts? (lights and model are all tagged static.. so..?)

baked is the dark one.

Also, this is URP

I'm using a pretty bright Environment Lighting -> Ambient Color, which works with realtime lights.

[deft fiber]

Baking lights calculates shadowing for environment lighting, so it doesn't go through everything as with realtime lights, but more likely only lights the outside of the room and through windows
It also looks like there could be some baking errors which prevent lights from working, I suggest to check debug views for texel validity and UV overlap

[meager edge]

Is it possible to make raytracing games ( simple copy games like subway surfers, flappy bird 3d)
With rtx 3050 4GB laptop GPU ?
( my full specs - Ryzen 5 5600H , 16gb ram , rtx 3050 4gb, SSD storage PCIe)
Reason - I want to make youtube videos like " I made flappy bird in 2 days but RTX is ON "

[deft fiber]

Sure? HDRP has ray-tracing features so that's what you like want to use

[timber lichen]

how can i make these bricks light up as if its a wall and only light up a small part?
Also in addition to that the light shouldnt pass through the wall..?
bricks are on a seperate tilemap than the ground

[timber lichen]

This seems to work fine :
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/hard-light-2d-152208

[oak dawn]

hello guys, is there a way to soften the shadows more? considering the fact that the shadows are pretty much as soft as a real shadow like 5-10 cm from the shadow, i could try increasing the shadow distance but first of all it ruins the performance a bit and the hard shadows become more pixelated which leads me to believe that on soft shadows some artifacts may appear, or do they?

[deft fiber]

Only HDRP has tweakable shadow softness via filtering settings and light source diameter
On BiRP and URP the best you can do is enable soft shadows
Decreasing shadow resolution makes them visually softer but less accurate

[oak dawn]

the only good thing since i'm using BiRP is probably a PCSS asset that i have downloaded that can modify the softness, but first of all PCSS eats performance at least 10 times a day and it uses a different system than unity so the shadows have dithering similar to GTA 4, BeamNG Drive and Euro Truck Simulator 2 (off the top of my head)

[broken quiver]

any idea why I get all those errors and can't bake light with GPU for this scene please?

[deft fiber]

The error suggests you're running out of RAM or VRAM

Sometimes I get memory errors which are fixed by restarting the editor or updating GPU drivers

Other than that you can find some potential workarounds by googling the error messages

[broken quiver]

I currently have 32Gb or RAM and a RTX 3070, I thought that was enough 😦

[broken quiver]

Tried but did nothing. With other smaller scenes it works fine, but not with this one 😦

Also I don't understand why it says that Available GPU memory is 506.9 MB

[deft fiber]

Restarting your computer would make sure all memory is freed for Unity to use
Other suggestions are to turn off Prioritize View, Progressive Updates and potentially Multiple Importance Sampling

[broken quiver]

okay thanks 😄

[late quiver]

guys the cubes are dark after generating the light

the mode of lighting was different that why any changes on lighting is not appearing

now i have a problem how do i stop reflection from object

[icy inlet]

Hi, so, I've been having this issue with shadow cascades recently... Possibly started after we upgraded to a more recent version of unity LTS (2021.3.9f)

you can see that at the edge of the cascade, the geometry is all weird, and the glitching changes with view direction

I've poked at the shadow shaders, tried using a different deferred shader, it doesn't make a difference.... also, this happens in both forward and deferred modes

anyone seen anything like this recently? This is unity 2021.3.9f1 (LTS)

hmm, actually, I just tried it in a test scene... and this doesn't happen... there must be some bad geometry eating up the shadowmap space in the main scene

going to try toggling some objects on/off and see if anything makes a difference

found it. I have a large plane that should just write depth all the way up to the horizon, but the mesh combining pass was picking it up and replacing it with a combined variant that had cast shadows on

it was taking up a chunk of the shadowmap space

disabling shadowcasting on that object fixes it

[fast jacinth]

guys any help? my spotlight is getting too overlight to near objects and not lighting objects that are 5 meters away

[late quiver]

guys

[late quiver]

are you using spot light ?

increase the range

[fast jacinth]

yes

i am using it

[fast jacinth]

already did to max range

doesnt change nothing

[late quiver]

you need to increase the intensity for that

[fast jacinth]

like i said

if i increase the intensity it just increase my problem

near object get even more over light

and far objects doesnt change nothing

[late quiver]

one idea i have

you can use raycast to position your light

if you don't want want to increase intensity

[fast jacinth]

i think i got this idea

but how would i ray cast in the middle of the flash light

or checking circle around the spotligh?

[late quiver]

use empty object

[late quiver]

add the raycaster element at center and as a child of torch

[fast jacinth]

but if it has a wall in the left near to me and a wall in the right far

and middle is point to far

[late quiver]

umm

[fast jacinth]

it will bug because flash light should light the left

[late quiver]

you can use sphere raycast

[fast jacinth]

how?

no idea the logical behind

[late quiver]

we already have sphere raycast you just have to use it

[fast jacinth]

no i mean i know how to use in the script

but how would i set this?

[shy peak]

Is there a way to make an object with emission contribute more to GI without increasing the emission? I have some gem veins I want to cast a glow around them but only a dim light on the cavewalls.
But to achieve the dim GI i want it needs to have some strong emission which is way to much

(I am really unexperienced in lighting so even if there are obvious settings expect that I don't know about them yet, because I don't^^ So any constructive input is welcome)

PS: i also had to reduce most settings to not wait 2h till my (proably wrong) settings are baked. Does that maybe also have an influence?

Thist are my current settings

If someone needs any other information just ask 🙂

[shy peak]

So I tried out some things and changed some settings since a post from 2 years ago suggested if your GPU isn't been used much it means you don't give it enough to do to properly operate so I increased the Bounces (as suggested in the post) and ... I feel like I simply don't get what Progressive GPU means? I thought it would start working properly now but it's still only the uses the CPU at 30-80% and the GPU idles at 5-10% doing nothing at all?

[acoustic tartan]

What setting affects when the distance of when lighting will affect the scene?

Example: Far away not affecting

A bit closer, lighting projected on mesh, shadow also rendered.

Using URP if that matters at all.

Ah I realized its a per object light limit

[oak dawn]

don't know if URP has deferred rendering, but if it does you should 100% use it especially if there's a lot of lighting in your scene, but if your game is targeting mobile platforms etc. then you should probably keep using forward rendering

[deft fiber]

Deferred rendering is one option of many to work around light limits
It has some considerable drawbacks so I wouldn't recommend it without reservation

[oak dawn]

but most of the time it's better to use Deferred since forward renders the object as many times as the light is affecting it, am i right? but i'm totally not an expert at Deferred rendering so don't really know how that works, but i heard it renders the lights only if you can see them, if an object is blocking the lit up object it will not calculate or render the lit up object if you can't even see it

i also heard it's not even 3D rendering, it's more of a workaround, that's why some people choose Forward+ Rendering, although Unity doesn't have that as far as i know

[deft fiber]

If you need a big number of lights, deferred rendering may be the only viable way to optimize them
The drawbacks I know of are:
-Higher performance overhead
-No transparent shader support
-No complex lit shader support (due to multipass shading I assume)
-No antialiasing besides post process types
-No camera stacking / overlay cameras
-SSAO has an extra cost
-Terrain blending is inaccurate (and unsupported when using accurate g-buffer normals)
-Baked subtractive and shadowmask lighting modes have an extra cost
-Light layers have an extra cost

In some cases you can make compromises with these, in others not
Forward+ rendering is implemented in 2022.2 beta / URP 14

[oak dawn]

oh that's cool to know

[deft fiber]

If you don't need a huge number of lights close to each other, you can also work around the limits a bunch just by limiting light ranges, slicing meshes into multiple objects and using baked lights for static geometry where applicable

[oak dawn]

that just means that, when i was making a retro FPS game similar to Quake, i chose forward rendering since most of the lighting there is baked and also there is not a lot of lights, other than the rocket lighting up a bit of stuff dynamically, weapon muzzle flash or whatever you wanna call it, and that's pretty much it, but when i'm making a driving simulator similar to Euro Truck Simulator 2 deferred is better since there's thousands of street lights, car headlights, day & night cycle sunlight with shadows, and overall deferred rendering is just a better choice for open world games similar to GTA

also, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and GTA 5 use deferred rendering for that reason probably. (i know they don't use Unity but the rendering should be atleast similar)

[deft fiber]

The cost of rendering lights is not simply the same as their number, but in case of forward rendering the number and complexity of meshes affected by them
With deferred rendering it's per screen pixel lit per light and cheaper per light, given the initial overhead, with meshes still rendered once per light if the light casts shadows
So it's not so clear cut to be able to say one system is for these genres and the other is for those

Correct optimization is specific to every individual scenario

[acoustic tartan]

So what are the known limitations of light probes? My current impression is that baked light maps + light probes are just strictly superior to realtime lighting with the exception of higher memory usage?

[crude lintel]

Increased memory usage, build size and time to bake them.

[deft fiber]

Types of light rendering are all tools in a toolbox for different purposes, none are "strictly" superior
Baked lightmaps are for static objects
Light probes are the only way to render lightmapped bounce lighting and ambient occlusion on dynamic objects
This leaves dynamic objects without any direct lighting, for which you'll usually have to use realtime or mixed light sources

Baked global illumination is great in quality, but the big drawback is obviously that it can't react to dynamically changing environments

Lightmaps take space on disk, which realtime lights don't
Though shadowmaps of both realtime and baked variety both need to take their space in RAM/VRAM

[uncut coral]

Hey...is it efficient to use over lapped uv map for texture and generate another uvs for lightmap in unity?

[deft fiber]

Yes, lightmapping uses the second UV channel to make this convenient

[amber moss]

Hello guys, I'm trying to recreate a solar system and I cannot figure out how to set up the Sun light.
If I use a directional light, only some planets will be lit properly, the planets on the other side of the orbit will be lit from a wrong angle.
If I use a point light at the centre of the Sun, I get very low quality cast shadows, due to the big distances between the planets and the Sun.
How do you think I should tackle this?

[warm basin]

Hello,
Can anyone assist me? I'm trying to implement lighting in my game scene, but it's bleeding from the walls in some places.
Unity Version : 2021.3.xx
Light Type : Point light
Render pipeline : URP
Could someone kindly help me in resolving this problem or point me in the right direction?

[chilly kettle]

your walls probably have no lightmap uv generated?

[warm basin]

we have turned on the lightmap UV generation in the mesh import settings, but problem still persists

[thorny goblet]

How do i fix this? I have bloom enabled, and its at the intensity i want, but its also affecting bouncing light, making it partially blind the player.

[deft fiber]

How does it look up closer?

At a glance I'd assume it's realtime shadow distance cutting off

[deft fiber]

You can make reflected light less intense by increasing material roughness and/or by making specular color darker when using specular material workflow

[bright rune]

Hi, I have a point light in a lightsaber and I want to limit how bright it gets because it goes from green to a bright white when near an object. Is there any way?

[thorny goblet]

Is it possible to make metallic and smoothness not affected by post processing

Any surface that reflects light also has the bloom

[deft fiber]

Not really

It sounds like you want to render the glow for specific geometry, decoupled from visual brightness
That's possible but it requires custom post processing

[thorny goblet]

Wait, how do i make Post processing ignore certain layers

[deft fiber]

You don't, hence it'd have to be an entirely custom effect

[thorny goblet]

How do i customize it, to work only with certain layers

or maybe just fix my problem with it applying to metallic surfaces

[deft fiber]

Post processing acts on the whole rendered image, you can't easily exclude anything from it
Creating a custom post processing effect, especially one that needs a custom pass or masking of some sort is not trivial

[thorny goblet]

Is it possible to eliminate post processing from certain materials, without losing my metallic look

[deft fiber]

As I said, no
You may be able to find some per-object bloom systems on the asset store

[thorny goblet]

Ok

Thanks i'll try that

[thorny goblet]

Wait what is making bloom, affect lights

How can i make bloom not affect lights

[warm basin]

Thanks for your guidance, it was resolved after increasing the shadow distance.

Hello,
These seam is visible on the walls after baking light. Can anyone assist me with this?
Unity Version : 2021.3.xx
Light Type : Point light
Render pipeline : URP

We tried the following, but it did not resolve the problem.

1. Enabled Stitch Seams in Mesh Renderer
2. Increased UV island margin
3. Enabled lightmap UV generation in the mesh import settings

[chilly kettle]

you mean the seams at the 90° angles in the corners?

[warm basin]

i was talking about these following seams as in the attached photo

[chilly kettle]

Do you have a shadow caster Mesh outside?

Often you need additional geometry to avoid this seams in the edges

And the seam from the corner of the window looks like its a problem caused by a to sharp triangle in your mesh

[warm basin]

Yes we have a whole backdrop island Mesh with shadow casting and contribution to GI enabled

[chilly kettle]

i mean directly outsite of your walls there. to avoid light hitting the corner of your room from thje outside

[warm basin]

No, nothing like that

[chilly kettle]

try to add some geo that blocks the light that can hit the corner from the outside. Should help with this seam there.

[stable sandal]

hey yall, im making a 2D platformer and my character has a 2D Spotlight on him but the spotlight shines on the background sprite that i have is there a way to make the spotlight ignore the background?

[fickle meadow]

Is it possible for a mesh to ignore specific shadow caster?

[upper fable]

I dont think it is. Shadow map doesnt contain anything other than the depth map meaning the shadow receiver cant know which object casted the shadow

The way shadow casting is usually implemented, it sounds pretty complicated to do that, I cant think of any easy way atleast

[deft fiber]

Light layers could do it if you're willing to dedicate one whole layer for the shadow

[viral osprey]

Does anyone know why I am getting this texture on the wall?

It used to be really perfect.

[deft fiber]

Check texel invalidity and UV overlap debug views

[timber lichen]

Does anybody know what I might have broke to make spotlights and point lights not emit unless you set them to ungodly high intensities like 300,000
In hdrp 12

[deft fiber]

Exposure values usually

[timber lichen]

Thank you for the reply.

[shy crystal]

Not sure if right area, but voxel based objects in my game that are diagonal have this issue where as I get furhter/closer or move the camera there are moving/flickering lines that grow/shrink

Any idea what causes this? Only on diagonal slopes (like in the picture is a diagonal roof that is just voxels stepped downwards mimicking a flat roof) - turning on anti aliasing made these lines 25% less visible but still they are there. Not sure what to do with that information just though I'd mention it.

[viral osprey]

Thank you for the reply, I'll look! :D

[deft fiber]

I'm confident it's the first one, but you should always check first when encountering any kind of blotchiness
Note that the data for debug views persists only for the session after light generation

[sinful crystal]

for some reason, this doesent show "Universal Render Pipeline"

Does anyone know how to fix this? Thanks! 🙂

[deft fiber]

URP = Universal Render Pipeline

[sinful crystal]

oh nvm

[deft fiber]

@sinful crystal The namings were changed to acronyms and swapped around a bit in some update, and sometimes people mislabel them anyhow so confusion ensues
Basically there's Assets and Renderers

[sinful crystal]

okay, I got it working now, Thanks!

@deft fiber do you know why "Render Pipeline" is not showing in my settings or has that changed too?

it should be there

[deft fiber]

Yes, moved to window>rendering iirc

[sinful crystal]

im sorry for bothering you so much @deft fiber but which one do I pick to uprgade scene to 2d renderer

[deft fiber]

Render Pipeline Converter now covers all those functions

[sinful crystal]

okay

this is the last question I promise😅 @deft fiber which one should I pick

because the covert assets is gray

I cant click it

[deft fiber]

I don't know which pipeline your project is on right now, either of the "convert to 2D", depending
You'll need to click "initialize converters" first, then tick the checkbox(es) which appear as desired, then convert

[sinful crystal]

okay👍

when I click convert nothing happens

and now the list is empty

[deft fiber]

Green checkmark says it's successfully converted
I may have misremembered that you should check the box of a category first, then initialize to initialize that category, which should make the actual materials appear
And that there is no URP to 2D, the middle option is to convert 2D to a newer 2D

[sinful crystal]

hmm okay. My scene isn't black though as in the tutorial that im watching. Any idea how to do that? also yeah I proke my promise but U are the only one helping:D

[deft fiber]

I don't recall all the steps off the top of my head, but to use the 2D renderer you shouldn't need more than to have the URP Asset and 2D Renderer created, configured and enabled in project settings, then have sprites using lit sprite materials and 2D lights in the scene

[sinful crystal]

okay I'll try

thanks again

I got it working @deft fiber 😩

[viral osprey]

Okay, the wall you see in the picture I shared is a probuilder. I clicked on this:

Using Unity light bake the whole scene and it solved the problem. Thank you so much.

Do you have any experience with Bakery GPU Lightmapper, @deft fiber?

[deft fiber]

Nope, Unity's progressive lightmapper only

[shy crystal]

I have this problem with small lines at distance, these shadow-waves appear and move around the object like a movie screen projecting animated lines on them. I think i've stumbled into somthing a bit bigger than I though, as I've started to look at even my 3d modeling software, and other games themselves. *such as the railroad tracks in rust, they have thin lines right next to each other, and does this effect at distance) Turns out small objects at distance (in anything?) does this? is this a computer graphics tech rendering problem that affects basically everything?

[deft fiber]

Moiré patterns occur even in real life, and any geometry or texture that's smaller than a pixel tends to shimmer between the possible colors as it can only choose one

MSAA type antialiasing and render scale (supersample antialiasing) help alleviate this, whereas post processing based such as SMAA and FXAA less so

Mostly games just avoid situations like that by design

Mip mapping blurs texture details over distance so colors blur together, LOD systems reduce polycounts so meshes don't have tightly packed geometry over distance

[shy crystal]

I managed to get some 3d cubes and rotate the angle of them and strech to fit the areas needed
to fix this, along with some model changes of thicker models. Thanks for the info had no clue about this

[analog cloud]

Ahoy!!! Does anyone know what could cause something like this with lightmaps?

settings are suuuuper low, only because its just for previews sake

[deft fiber]

Check texel invalidity debug view (and UV overlap while you're at it)
Looks like a typical case of https://forum.unity.com/threads/faq-blocky-artifacts-appear-when-i-bake-a-scene-how-can-i-fix-them.951444/

[analog cloud]

Cheers @deft fiber ! Will take a look

[open coral]

Hello, I need to make one object's shadow be turned on but while another object not be receiving it. Basically I wanna turn off another object's shadow on ONLY one particular object.

How should I do that? 😄

The object that receives the shadow need to be able to receive shadows from other objects too

I think i need to get into shaders now

[long pewter]

Hello!
Can soemone help me fix that horizon light in HDRP?
When I rotate the sun, the horizon should transition smoothly between light and dark, but instead it creates that light.

[fiery current]

I see a lot of light leaks under walls like this one. It's modelled as walls + a single floor plane for the whole apartment. Is the answer to break up the floor into smaller discrete planes for each room?

[timber lichen]

how do I make a light not affect the skybox

[dull marlin]

Is there a way I can make lights only render based on the position the camera is in? I'm having a lot of lights in my scene and they're starting to clip/cause lighting issues.

Especially when you're on different floors. I can see lights from downstairs bleeding into upstairs and vice versa. If I had a way to be able to determine a select region that only rendered a certain set of objects if the camera was inside it, that would probably work. I know about Occlusion Culling but I don't know if that works for lighting too.

[deft fiber]

If you mean "how to make directional light not affect the procedural skybox" then you cannot exactly
The skybox shader is programmed to always use the brightest directional light's rotation to determine its appearance
You'd need a different shader that uses something else

[timber lichen]

so only the brightest affects it?

I could've worked with that

but I already deleted the light so

[deft fiber]

I believe so, the brightest directional light is considered to be the "main light" by many things

[timber lichen]

ok

[deft fiber]

You could use light layers, if your render pipeline supports it, to separate the lighting on adjacent floors or rooms
It's also an option to disable/enable the lights by script based on camera position
There's no occlusion culling for lights because when meshes are all culled from a light's range, the light doesn't effectively do anything afaik

[dull marlin]

I could definitely separate the light layers (probably per-floor, per-room would be too much IMO). How would I go about then actually activating those layers?

[deft fiber]

I'm thinking of pre-setting the layers, setting them at runtime may be useful but I'm not sure how

I haven't seen anyone do this so I don't know how sane it is, but I would try to have a layer for all floors that need to be adjacent, and a layer for connecting areas which need to be lit by both

Such as layers A, B and AtoB
Lights and geometry on floor 1 would be on layer A and AtoB
On floor 2 they would be on B and AtoB
On floor 3 back to A again

[dull marlin]

I just went ahead and pre-set them. "Lower Layer" and "Higher Layer" based off the floor/upstairs. I can't remember for the life of me where I actually make those layers render though

[deft fiber]

Light layers are different from render layers, and their availability (and implementation I suppose) varies by render pipeline

[dull marlin]

Oh I know, but I thought there was a setting in the camera to pick what light layers render

Or it was somewhere else..

Oh crap, think I see what you mean now.

Might of been using those wrong.

lol

[deft fiber]

Light layers correspond to layers which mesh objects are on

[dull marlin]

Yeah definitely used them wrong. Technically Render Layers would do the same trick though, I believe

Those are probably togglable in the Camera code too

[deft fiber]

If render layers can disable lights then yes, that'd be functionally the same as disabling the lights by code I guess

If I understand correctly

[viral osprey]

Any suggestion on fixing this? I enabled the stitch seams under the Mesh Renderer component.

[dull marlin]

I threw the lights Render Layer under "Lower_Layer" and "Higher_Layer", modified the Main Camera to remove them from the Culling Mask list but they're still showing up. Tried it on other objects too. Am I missing something?

https://i.imgur.com/JDfcE5X.png https://i.imgur.com/LTHWJf7.png

[deft fiber]

I don't think you can cull lights themselves via layers, but this is not something I've experimented with extensively

My first suggestion doesn't require that though
Only that lights are culling mesh objects from different floors

[dull marlin]

I layered the parent the light was attached to with Lower_Layer and that did make it disappear, but I was still able to toggle the light off and on just fine when it shouldn't be enabled at all. Damn

So you were right that you can't layer the lights directly, but I guess because it doesn't matter as the renderer ignores it for lights.

[austere rose]

hey. In URP, is there a way to control the diffuse and specular intensity of a directional light separately?

[hot beacon]

hi, i am trying to use reflection prob on Realtime, but when i build it and run the proj in the android it didnt reflect anything and the material color become black,does android didnt support realtime reflection probe?

[deft fiber]

No, unless you have a custom shader that implements a variable for that in the light calculation process itself

[deft fiber]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-android-mobile-reflection-probe.308092/#post-3508849 you could try the suggestions on this post and the next ones

[austere rose]

thank you

[deft fiber]

Modifying the light calculation in URP is relatively hard since it comes so prepackaged, but it's not an impossible idea
HDRP for example has light diameter/radius which does pretty much that, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's some advanced lighting asset out there that does it for URP

[austere rose]

It's not super important for my project so doesn't sound like it's worth it, thanks again

[weak meteor]

urp project.light leaks.
set normal=0
light leaks at vertex point.

how can I reduce the light leakage to empty?

[hot beacon]

thank you, i was already reading that post but somehow it just flew out of my head, after re-read it just now i finally understand it lol

[weak meteor]

hdrp project.light leaks at vertex point as default.

[deft fiber]

It's usually for the best to keep shadow bias settings at default to prevent shadow problems
Disconnect faces or corners with sharp normals will appear as holes to shadow casters in almost all situations, so it's best to pad them with shadows-only meshes or at least use smooth normals where possible

[weak meteor]

Light leaks from the edges with default shadow bias settings

[deft fiber]

Yes, which is why you should work around it with extra shadow casters
If you can fix the problem with extreme bias values, that's good, but I expect more problems that way

[wheat thicket]

where is this probe assigned?

this is a probe that was in a sample scene i believe, since then the scene has been redone.. the probes no where in the scene yet, i can still bake it and get it show the skybox..

can't find where its linked to this particular scene

[deft shale]

does anyone know why lighting occurs like this?

ah nevermind, disregard this. It was an issue I made in blender

[upper fable]

Thats called "z-fighting" in case you want to learn more about it

[timber lichen]

So uh

Everytime I bake it just loops this

Unless I start moving my camera around my scene

I closed unity I've reset my pc nothing has worked so far and I can't seem to figure it out

if anyone can help me I'd like that but I do have 3 reflection probes

[deft fiber]

If it seems specifically tied to this, you could try disabling progressive updates / prioritize view settings
Otherwise I think getting stuck at "preparing bake" might be a an issue of memory/vram, especially if there are too many/complex meshes marked as lightmapped

All lightmapped meshes should have relatively low polycounts, and small static objects can be marked to recieve baked GI from light probes instead of lightmaps to save lightmap memory

[uncut coral]

I thought light probes only used for dynamic objects.

Everyday we learn something new....ty

[long pewter]

Hello

Can someone help me figure out how to fix the horizon sunset problem in HDRP?

I tried to solve it for some time but couldn't

[paper lichen]

I'm currently having an issue where in the editor, the lighting from my directional light works just fine. However, when I build the game, it's like the scene has a giant shadow casted over it. Here's an image of what I'm talking about (top picture is in the editor, bottom is in the build). This project uses HDRP

[deft fiber]

First things I'd check are if you've hidden some geometry in-editor which should be revealed by the eye icon, and that the quality setting you're building with is the same quality setting you're editing with in case there's differences in shadow settings or something

If all else fails I expect Frame Debugger or RenderDoc could reveal what's actually going on

[paper lichen]

Thank the lord I just fixed it (I think). I believe what was actually happening was that the upper terrain layer I had had a hole in it to make room for the dug out tunnel, but that hole was still casting shadows in the build. I turned off casting shadows for the terrain, and I think I'm all good now.

[iron dome]

Baked lighting. How do you actually DO this?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GPUProgressiveLightmapper.html

[naive sun]

Hey Guys, I'm overdoing my current project and I want to know your opinion:
Which Color for the Lamps do you think looks better? Blue(❌) or Yellow(✅)?

[hot beacon]

hi, i want to make mirror for my project (simple mirror not like that two way mirror) for VR project (using URP), and my boss told me he doesnt want to use second camera for the mirror because it's very expensive performance wise, and when i tried using reflection probe the reflection sometimes looks weird, is there any other way? thanks

[deft fiber]

Nope
Reflection probes won't work for that unless they're realtime, and if they're realtime they're worse than an extra camera for the purpose
(cube projected prebaked reflection probes would create proper mirror reflections for rectangular rooms, but don't expect to see any dynamic objects or accurate details in the reflections)

[hot beacon]

yeah, you are right, i tried realtime reflection probe and the project run very laggy,and thank you

[storm flax]

a realtime reflection probe is probably worse than just using a second camera, as you’re rendering the game six extra times - one for each surface of a cube

[hot beacon]

how about plannar reflection from HDRP? is it still better to use second camera instead?

[storm flax]

as far as I know planar only renders the scene a single extra time, so that might be alright

it might be worthwhile experimenting and seeing what works better

[hot beacon]

ah ok, thanks for your information

[hot beacon]

yeah i will do that, thanks

[deft fiber]

That is the extra camera method your boss wants to avoid

[zealous trout]

Does anyone know why my lighting is so messed up?

It was working fine not too long ago

It seems to be a gpu issue? I have no idea why though

Another issue im having is these weird lighting artifacts? I have no idea how to remove them

There is no UV Overlap

[zealous trout]

and it's still doing it

[deft fiber]

@zealous trout This may be a bit of a long shot but try baking with/without multiple importance sampling

[iron dome]

Bump

[deft fiber]

VRAM isn't limited by any setting as far as I know, so that line suggests to get a better GPU 😂

[zealous trout]

That seemed to fix it

[glass mulch]

I need some advice on stupid efficient lighting

i'm looking to have each one of these crystals have a light source on each of these crystals

i'm not sure how many are in this field alone, but . . .a lot

likely in the low hundreds

this field alone is aproximately 9/10ths of my hierarchy list

[upper fable]

Id really seriously consider faking the effect in some way (like bloom pp effect) or if thats not an option, deferred rendering is your best bet

[glass mulch]

would there be any way to locallize the bloom to just the crystals?

[deft fiber]

I'd use glow billboard sprites for that

Or one of the two methods mentioned above

[lunar pollen]

use an emmisive material

• bloom

= glow

[upper fable]

Make them brighter so they will glow more than the environment

[glass mulch]

the shader on them is emissive, I turned up the emissivity and bloom but that tanked performance

would having a billboard that mimics glow on the base of the crystals work?

[deft fiber]

You don't have to increase scatter or intensity or any setting that fundamentally changes the cost of the bloom effect, just the threshold value and material emission intensity in tandem to make it show through (unless you mean to say that bloom in general tanks your performance)

[deft fiber]

That's what I'm suggesting

[glass mulch]

that actually seems to do the job really well

I could likely combine approaches

[deft fiber]

Sure that's doable

[glass mulch]

the FPS seems to drop to the 30's every couple of seconds

[deft fiber]

The stats panel is not an effective tool for analyzing performance
You'll want to make a test build connected to the profiler
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/profiler-profiling-applications.html

[glass mulch]

thank you for your help Everyone!

[near bison]

Does anyone know how Stray casts real time shadows from the cat onto objects even though most of the lighting appears to be baked? Is this something that can only be done with deferred rendering? I have to use forward because I'm doing VR. Is it possible to render a shadow into baked lighting without illuminating the surface? I was thinking maybe what they've done is calculate the dominant light direction throughout the world, and then they somehow calculate a soft shadow to project onto the surface below the cat. I've noticed the robots seem to just cast circular shadows by their feet, but the cat shadow seems more detailed.

[placid sierra]

Hi everyone. In my editor, the lighting looks like the first image, but whenever I build the game it looks like the bottom image. Does anyone know why this is happening?

[little condor]

Maybe what you're referring to is called 'Mixed lighting'.

In Unity you can set your Directional light mode to be 'Mixed' and any static geometry such as terrain and buildings will have baked shadow applied. You non-static objects, like moving characters, will cast dynamic shadows that will then be blended into the baked shadows.

[near bison]

No, I'm aware of mixed lighting. Mixed lighting casts hard shadows from dynamic objects and only when they're directly lit by the light. An avatar inside a house lit only by bounced light from outside will not cast a shadow because it is technically in the shadow of the house.

Stray does have a lot of lights in its world so I suppose they could have used mixed lighting, but their shadows look way too soft to be mixed lighting as I've seen it.

[little condor]

I haven't played Strayed, so I'm not sure what the lighting effect you're after is. But mixed lighting is usually pretty good, as long as the lights that cast static shadows don't change. Soft dynamic shadows blend with static shadows fine too.

Or, maybe it's raytracing?

[placid sierra]

I had this issue in March when I first installed URP and I remember fixing it, but I’ve forgotten

[timber lichen]

Hi,

I have a room that can be dark but you can turn on the light.
To do this with baked lightning, I have to switch between both mappings

But

What if I want to dim the light from high brightness to low brightness

I think that isn't possible with baked lightning?

I noticed when using realtime lightning like point lighting. The lights go through the walls. I also played with the shadow but that doesn't make any differents

thats why I was thingking to use area light what only works with baked lightning

Are there any solutions for this situation?

[deft fiber]

Lighting needs to be generated for each scene for there to be an ambient light probe when switching scenes
The problem doesn't occur in editor because the editor generates them on the fly

[placid sierra]

So, I just need to regenerate my lighting?

[deft fiber]

Yes
Note that "baked lightmapping" doesn't need to be enabled for it

[placid sierra]

Thanks so much. I wonder why I had to bake it again though. I was messing around with PlayerPrefs and it happened. I’ll fix it nonetheless.

[timber lichen]

You need to generate lighting

Oh yeah answered already

[next eagle]

Does anyone have an idea why the floor and backwall don't show up in my reflection probe when I bake it? 🤔 I am kind of stumped. They don't seem to be different in regards to settings but im probably missing something.

[stark temple]

Are they marked as reflection probe static?

[hard grail]

Does anyone know why my realtime lighting looks so different to baked?
It makes it incredibly hard to create a good workflow of making a scene when everything looks vastly different after spending hours baking it.
I'm also not talking slightly different. I setup a little test light in my scene baking only one light and its about 5-6x brighter than my real time light.
What's the deal?

It also makes no sense to me that one baked light at a low resolution takes 5-8 minutes to bake. I have a 3080 RTX...

[deft fiber]

@hard grail I can make a wild guess why that happens, or you can show before/after pictures of the scene + lightmapping settings used and I can make a more educated guess

[hard grail]

Yeah sorry I'm just setting up images

I appreciate my lightmap resolution is 64, which is very low. I tried this with 2048 and it does the exact same thing give or take

On top of this. This is the only light set to 'baked' in my scene, and the baking process for this one point light at low resolution takes approx 10 minutes...

The real time light settings for this point light is 40,000 lumen, which should be very bright. The baked lighting probably seems more accurate given these values. That being said, it doesn't help the situation that I can't possibly sit here adding light by light and waiting for it to bake for 10 minutes each time before I know what it looks like.

[deft fiber]

Lightmap bake time is largely based on the complexity of static meshes, especially ones set to recieve lighting from baked lightmaps instead of light probes
If you want to decrease bake complexity it's better best to reduce "lightmap resolution" and keep max lightmap size at a properly high value

Decreasing the direct, indirect and environment samples (by half, for example) is a decent way to speed up baking, but lightmap resolution value is the most significant factor out of them

[hard grail]

What are your thoughts regarding the massively different look of these lights?

[deft fiber]

There's a harsh difference in brightness on the adjacent floor panels, which suggests to me they don't have valid lightmap UVs

So the lit texels are covering the whole panel

[hard grail]

Okay, is there a way to confirm this or even fix it?

[deft fiber]

The first thing is to make sure "generate lightmap UVs" is enabled in mesh import settings

That usually fixes it

[hard grail]

Okay, just checked, that was not checked...

It looks different already but let me see after bake is complete

Looks different, still super bright though

[deft fiber]

When doing test bakes it's also hugely helpful to disable all noncritical geometry, or use a second tiny test scene
My test bakes usually take less than 10 seconds on a 3070 on comparable settings, though I use URP

@hard grail Oh I just spotted your max bounces is 8
iirc the docs don't recommend higher than 2 or 3

Specifically due to bake time concerns

[hard grail]

I can't seem to change them values

just defaults back to 8

[deft fiber]

The console also warns about the UV problem

[hard grail]

Wait, it lets me now, weird

[deft fiber]

Correction, "values higher than 10 might lead to significantly longer bake times, but 2 is the default and probably suitable for most cases

[hard grail]

Okay, Mixed lighting baked seems to generate the same brightness of my real time lights

But when the light is set to baked, its 10x brighter...

That being said ,your changes has made my baking take about 5 seconds now

But I don't understand why baked lighting does this

[hard grail]

Yeah, I've tried everything here, all my baked lighting just seems way brighter than if I used real-tiem

[winter moth]

can I make it so that a point light is not extremely bright at it's center point in URP? Basically a point light with a maximum brightness or something? I have been trying to achieve RTS/city builder style lighting around units and using point lights just above units are way too bright when very close to a tree or other mesh

It seems like a really common thing to want to do, but I'm having trouble finding any guides online or advice from google searches

[timber lichen]

Ugh

It's stuck on this

It's just constantly preparing bake

Flickering up an down

These are my settings

How can I fix this?

[deft fiber]

That's something I haven't seen before either
Possibly something specific to HDRP

[deft fiber]

Stuck at preparing bake may suggest that polycounts for static objects are too high

[timber lichen]

And how does one lower it

[deft fiber]

Use less complex meshes

That's very generic advice though, I'm not sure if that's the specific issue in your scene

[timber lichen]

I’m new to this

I need like

Spoonfed information

Because idk what to change or do

Because for some reason

If I move my camera it starts to bake

[deft fiber]

That's not an option unfortunately, unless you're willing to hire a personal tutor

[timber lichen]

I mean

I’m just trying figure why it only bakes when my camera moves

And glitches when it doesn’t

[deft fiber]

I would confirm that there is no bake in process, auto-generate is off and then restart the editor

[timber lichen]

I’ve done that

Turning it off an on again isn’t going to help it is the most basic form of tech support

I do appreciate your advice

[deft fiber]

I can assure you that technique has solved many problems, even here

[timber lichen]

And yet as mentioned previous

[timber lichen]

^^

[hard grail]

Thanks @deft fiber for your help anyway mate

[iron dome]

Any recommendations on how high to set this value? I want them soft but I don't want to bake 3 times and waste 40 minutes testing it out. What's a max value before they're too smoothed? 2? 5? 50?

[weak meteor]

Placed a reflection probe.
If you move the viewpoint, the inside of the mirror will not move.
What should I do?
(The level is importing UE samples)

[deft fiber]

This is how reflection probes work, it's just a baked 6-sided image
Some workarounds are to use box projection to give perspective rendering to the six sides, or the realtime setting and move the probe along with the object that needs to reflect

Don't expect full physical accuracy with either method though

To clarify the second option doesn't help with moving viewpoint, but it does with a moving reflective object

[weak meteor]

Did it.
simply couldn't

[weak meteor]

i could by hdrp
i will discover by urp.

[deft fiber]

These limitations are fundamental to reflection probes across all pipelines
You'll need another reflection system entirely, such as screen space reflections or ray traced reflections which are offered on HDRP

[limber delta]

Hey guys, any idea why those light "splotches" show up? I'm on Unity 2021.3.0f1 and URP. I went with high direct and indirect samples as well as lightmap resolution and the resolution seems to have made it better (was worse), but there are still artifacts. Thanks

Ok, seems like upping the resolution to 120 did it 😅 Feels fairly high though. Not too bad bad on the lightmap sizes or bake time so I guess that is what I need to do for final bakes.

(I did lower direct and indirect samples by 50% but changed min and max bounces to 3 and 5)

[thorny goblet]

https://i.imgur.com/Xty7YNQ.png How do i fix it, this is caused from two Lights attempting to light the same area?

[iron dome]

Is there a way to have unity FBX files check generate lightmaps by default? Feels bad when I bake 30 minutes and then forget a single small models generate lightmap UVs option, and have to rebake it all again and then realise there was another model that didn't have generated light map UVs etc. lol.

[daring haven]

Have you tried fiddling with Radius on the light? No light emits within that radius, so if you set it bigger I think you won't get the intense center point (but you also get no light inside the radius). I tried a weak light with a zero radius and a brighter light with a bigger radius - but it was not great for my case.

[worthy forum]

Are light probes some kind of joke ?

[timber lichen]

Can you show your probe setup, looks like you did something wrong

[shy crystal]

In scene view the light works, and in the game it does... until you call any sort of way to disable/enable the light (including just setting color alpha etc) once the light is changed to an off state it is permanently off and never is able to shine again UNLESS i set the intensity to something like 55555 and then it gives everything a shadow but does show up just like in scene view.

Any ideas why this is happening?

Second picture shows the light working as intended (on enable/disable of any kind) if intensity is set to very high but again, causes a giant shadow on the truck

[deft fiber]

I haven't seen anything like that happen before, but I recommend against using a light for that purpose if you want just the light itself to be lit up

Emissive materials would be cheaper and more effective

[shy crystal]

@deft fiber I guess I was trying to do it the "old" way(based on some info I looked up apparently) and didn't' really know about emissive materials (New to this all). Managed to get it working now, thanks!

[wheat dune]

Not a general working on unity, can anyone tell me how I can fix this issue.

My Scene view is very bright but my game very is dark. How can I fix that so both look the same?

[strong python]

Hi! my blender models are 100% without overlapping, what is still causing these light artefacts in many places? I am using gpu progressive lightmapper and urp.

[deft fiber]

Do you specifically have lightmap UV generation enabled in mesh import settings?

[strong python]

no, i want to use it from blender

[deft fiber]

That's an option, but why?

[strong python]

as i can see it is is not accurate and sometimes has artefacts too. And also if mesh has hundred thousands vertices (disaplacement) unity just freezes on import

i spend a lot of time to make good uvis and i thought this is enough to make perfect lightmapping

[deft fiber]

I usually recommend against trying to make manual lightmap UVs because of how much tweaking it requires and due to how subpar blender's automatic UV operations are for the purpose compared to Unity's
In this case I'd assume the lightmap resolution is too low and there is either no margins or too small margins so the color bleeds between islands

I don't know your specific case but running into that kind of vert issue may suggest that it's better to substitute polycounts with normal+parallax mapping or slice meshes into segments, for more reasons than just lightmap processing

[strong python]

this building, i showed, does not have so many polygons, so i tried to auto generate uvs in unity and it became even worse, maybe resolution is low i dont know. This is my settings:

Enlighten lightmapper can help as it does not take into account uvs but, when the scene is very large, i ran out of ram during hours of lightmapping

[deft fiber]

The most important part is to figure out what the problem exactly is with the lightmaps / UVs

The lighting window has a tab to view the baked lightmap which can give important clues

Meshes have their own settings for how to generate lightmap UVs which may be necessary to tweak, though in most cases the defaults are fine

The most common problems I see is the lightmap running out of resolution or max size to fit all the UV regions in

Or the meshes are have problematic unit scales which can lead their scale on the lightmap be off by a huge factor, skewing the whole process

[strong python]

you mean meshes have settings for lightmaps if i generate it in unity?

[deft fiber]

Yes

I also recommend starting with default lightmapping settings and tweaking them proportionally and conservatively
You're probably getting diminishing returns with those sample counts

https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.1/Documentation/Manual/GPUProgressiveLightmapper.html The lightmapper documentation gives some guidelines for what kind of values would be reasonable

[strong python]

what are problematic unit scales?

[deft fiber]

FBX files sometimes import with a scale of 100 or 0.01 depending on what scaling mode is used both on export and import, so you may end up with a single mesh that eats up most of the lightmap regardless of its actual size, or is drawn so small it shows nothing but artefacts
You'd look for mesh renderer gameobjects with those scales or at the lightmap to see if there's obviously odd partitioning

[strong python]

scale is 100 indeed

[deft fiber]

All gameobjects ideally should have a scale close to 1, and in mesh import settings a scale that makes them appear normally at the scale of one

"scale factor" and "convert units" have an impact on the practical scale if I remember correctly

The "scale in lightmap" setting also impacts this, but probably best used for small tweaks on individual objects

[strong python]

scale factor is 1 and convert units checked, and object in the scene has scale 100

is it about fbx export settings?

[deft fiber]

Both export and import matter, they just need to be in agreement
Iirc "apply fbx unit scale" in blender should make this scale stuff work right without tweaking, but there were a lot of options

In that case I would try scaling object in scene to 1 and setting scale factor to 100*, expecting that lightmap UV will then be generated at correct scale

[strong python]

ok i will thing about all of this, thank you very much!

[deft fiber]

Is the level geometry marked static?

If the concept seems unfamiliar I recommend reading the documentation's guide to light baking or watching a tutorial video about it

I expect every tutorial mentions it since it's a fundamental part of the process
Such as https://youtu.be/okYhs6kQ0xw

If you have a capable GPU, you can use GPU baking instead of CPU which should be orders of magnitude faster
And for test bakes I recommend you decrease "lightmap resolution" by 25-75% to reduce quality but increase speed, depending on the balance you want

The time estimate can swing a lot

You can find answers easily in many cases by googling the exact error or description of problem
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProgressiveLightmapper-UVOverlap.html

[still flare]

hey i posted this in URP channel but maybe someone here can help so :" i wanted to make a demobuild of my project today in 3DURP unity 2021.9f1 and my build is way darker than in unity editor scene view
can someone help?"

[timber lichen]

can anyone tell me what are these weird colors i get after baking the light

the wall supposed to be only white

what is that yellow and light red colors

[strong python]

Hi! i spent all day tweaking my mesh, uvs and export, import settings and it didnot work( i tried to scale uvs, make big margin between islands, increse lightmap resolution (up to 100) and lightmap size, change scale export settings, and nothing. I noticed that near by objects on the scene influence on lightmap too (indirect light?) and problems appear on small parts of the mesh. For example little windows in array or some tower ornament. If i make just walls, for tower for example, everything is fine!

[deft fiber]

Did you check lightmap debug views in addition to UV overlap, such as texel invalidity?

And did anything seem off in the lightmap textures themselves

Looking at the texture asset may reveal issues not apparent in the scene view

[strong python]

looks normal

[deft fiber]

Red parts are not good, but they don't seem to be a cause of the specific issue

[strong python]

also, i can see that some light illuminates, but what to do with this information

[timber lichen]

why is that part of the wall has this weird UV chart

[deft fiber]

In this place the red texel invalidity does seem to coincide with the illuminant blotch

[sterile iron]

How to fixe that pleas?

[deft fiber]

Could use more info
When does the error occur
Does the error seem to break some functionality
Which unity version and render pipeline is it
Are the threads and/or bug reports you find by googling the error relevant to your case and/or are their suggested workarounds applicable

[timber lichen]

Looks like yes, shadows should fix it

[timber lichen]

while baking the light, if i sit the indirect flirt to 5, will that effect who long it will take to bake ?

[bleak patrol]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask but what's the preferred dynamic global illumination technique for very large scene (LOD will be probably involved) that may change relatively fast?
My use-case is day-night cycle in a top-down view with a time fast-forward option and the possibility to zoom in.
I've read enlighten global illumination is not ideal in cases the light source changes fast in a short time (fast-forward).
I'm not sure what functionality/feature to look at, any advice will be much appreciated

[timber lichen]

Weird

I have no clue tbh lol

[limber delta]

What does the "Lightmap Indices" show? When I click it I get a view with a mix of pink and lightblue colors. I can't seem to find any info on this mode when googling.

[brazen silo]

Sup peeps! I was wondering how to get similar lighting to this in unity?

[timber lichen]

whats the best way to make these shadows be not so "detailed"
its really distracting seeing all those holes between the tree leaves not cast a shadow

[upper fable]

Seems very minimalistic shader with slight dot product lighting (the effect of lighting is scaled down a lot) and color sampled from texture. Also note the block edge outlines which makes the edges more clear while the lighting is quite subtle, those edges could be baked into the texture or maybe even better, calculated on the fly using the world space position and partial derivatives (that way it could always stay at 1 pixel thickness for example)

[timber lichen]

why the shadow always come out looks bad after backing even tho i increased the light map quality and everything

this is for VR platform btw

why its not a smooth shadow but squares

[azure schooner]

Any idea what would cause realtime GI to stop working when entering play mode? It works in the editor and in a build, but nothing in play mode in the editor. https://streamable.com/ture1m

[deft fiber]

This is probably due to lightmap compression and filtering settings

Textureless surfaces with very gradual shadows reveal compression artefacts, and if filtering/denoising settings aren't great there will be extra noise that leads to larger compression artefacts

I'd verify that "automatic" filtering doesn't produce better results than the current one, and set the compression to none at least for testing

Changing lightmap compression luckily doesn't require a new bake, at least if directly changed from the lightmap texture asset

[timber lichen]

oh yeah setting the compression to none did fix it, thanks !

[small egret]

I have baked lighting in this room from an emissive material in the ceiling. I'm wondering if it's possible to not have the red color from the floor tile reflected onto the adjacent wall? The emissive material is set to not cast shadows, as is the red floor tile.

[timber lichen]

is it possible to bake objects indivially ?

[storm flax]

no

[twilit elm]

why does the default unity cube have overlapping lightmap uvs

[deft fiber]

By itself it doesn't, I believe, but it's it possible that lightmap UVs from different objects end up overlapping on the collective lightmap, such as when not having enough space or margins

[storm flax]

I think I should add onto my answer a little bit - if you look on the roadmap (https://portal.productboard.com/8ufdwj59ehtmsvxenjumxo82/c/1245-scene-independent-lighting-data-bake-prefabs?utm_medium=social&utm_source=portal_share), this is actually a feature that is under consideration

it may help a bit for something like Enlighten precomputed realtime illumination, but otherwise I think the system would still have troubles if you used lightmapping

[deft fiber]

You could bake with a white panel and swap the material to red afterwards

[timber lichen]

What has happened here?

A perfect line where everything is bleached

[deft fiber]

Assuming the bake is finished, try clearing the lighting cache and baking with multiple importance sampling disabled

[twilit elm]

How do I achieve light rays? I have volumetric fog turned on, yet my spotlight still does not show light rays
Do I need to bake the lights?

[lunar pollen]

you can use vxgi

SEGI still works on modern versions of unity and is free

only works on built in tho

quality is unstable/inconsistent with camera movement tho

[wet heron]

when i try to bake my lights i get this error:

Assertion failed on expression: 'm_PendingLightmapHashes.size() == m_LightmapCompositeHashes.size()'

[bleak patrol]

Much appreciated! I'll check them out, thank you so much!

[brazen silo]

Hey thank you so much for the information, I will now be doing some research! 🙂

[crude lintel]

So I'm not sure if it fits better here, the urp channel or the 2d tools channel, but does anybody have experience with 2d lighting in shadows with custom meshes?

It seems like lights 2d in urp currently doesn't support mesh renderers, it only does sprite renderers, but I have to use them, since there's special geometry(kinda like paths) and it doesn't seem like I can set custom meshes for sprite renderers. At least not the same way as with mesh renderers.

Is there a way to have 3d lights and shadows look similar to how they do with lights 2d?

[crude lintel]

Hmm... It seems like sprite shape renderer might work in place of my custom meshes.🤔

[idle schooner]

How do I go about baking a scene (with baked lights only) that contains almost a thousand meshes?

Baking seems to take a lot of time, likely as it's needing to generate a ridiculous amount of lightmaps

[idle schooner]

I think I've found a potential solution, which is to limit the amount of lightmaps being generated.

I did so by going to Lightmap Settings > Lightmap Parameters and limiting the lightmap count in the parameter file.

[daring haven]

My reading of HDRP lens flare is you add the Lens Flare (SRP) component to the light you want flares on. Is there any other way? My lights are in a location prefab and I don't always want flares on it - just for a few shots. I was hoping lens flare would be part of the camera so that shot would do it, but I cannot see post process for lens flare on the camera (bloom is closet)?

[oak dawn]

what would be the most realistic/good performance way to handle car/truck/bus etc. reflections? i feel like reflection probes aren't really the best way because of the performance, especially if there's like 20 cars and all of them have different reflection probes, would be nice to have something like GTA 5 did and that is, that the reflections are only rendered once and they only render static objects, so you can't see other cars or other people in the reflections.

[upper fable]

Depends how large the scene is etc. but stationary reflection probes with reflection probe blending could work

[deft fiber]

Screen space reflections are usually the best compromise
You may have some success with box-projected reflection probes

Games where reflections are prominient have some very fancy techniques for optimizing them, but they've got graphics engineers dedicated for that task unlike us

[upper fable]

Depends on the game, ss reflections could be really good, they can only reflect things visible in camera but that may not be a problem, depends on the camera angles

[oak dawn]

well, i'm asking this for a game that would be similar to Euro Truck Simulator 2, so the world/scene would be massive

[deft fiber]

If you can afford realtime reflection probes at all, it's possible to cull most objects from their view, and it may be possible to render the remaining meshes with a significant LOD offset

[oak dawn]

then i'm guessing that would not work for cars, because imagine you're looking at a car's left door and the reflection should see what is behind you, but the camera can't see what's behind

[deft fiber]

Cars generally? Yes
It's not usually a problem when SSR falls back to static reflections in a case like that
With car mirrors? No

[upper fable]

Yeah, reflection probes are used for areas that ssr fails

[oak dawn]

also, i haven't really looked into SSR, but is it possible to make it not affect a few objects? because i remember turning on SSR while a car had a reflection probe, so the car had like a black shade or something.

[deft fiber]

Probably because it had no other type of reflection to fall back to
I'd look at fixing that before trying to exclude things

[river parrot]

Hi, any tips how to archieve good/dark space lighting?

[deft fiber]

This could mean a lot of things
What kind of lighting do you mean exactly?

[river parrot]

I tried this

So anything that is not in path of Star

is Dark

but i dont have good feeling from it

i mean in real space is like this right?

And i can add volumetric cause that is dependant on fog*

[deft fiber]

You could bake a reflection probe so you'll get an average of the illumination of the stars and asteroids

[river parrot]

Hmm how big can reflection probe be?

[deft fiber]

I don't know what the practical limit is
Once baked I believe you can move it around

You generally shouldn't emulate solar systems in real world scale

[river parrot]

Yeah i know, i experiment what is good and what not

i dont have goal, is all learning stuff that no one maded before

or isnt on web to learn

Realistic Space Ligting is pain 😄

Basicaly

if you look on Alien Movies

they nailed Space Lighting

[deft fiber]

They faked it with studio lighting mostly, so it's not really an effect that would hold up from other angles
You can get a similar effect if your baked reflections include light sources or bright areas that exist only on the reflected cubemap

Or probably most straightforward is to have big stars, nebula or a nearby planet drawn on the scene skybox so it naturally gives illumination to ships and asteroids

[small egret]

I'll try that! Thanks!

[delicate snow]

Why does the light calculation in the game view seem laggy while the light calculation in the scene view does not?

[deft fiber]

I don't know what kind of lag you mean
On the video they look exactly the same

[carmine dove]

Hello guys! Hope you r doing well!

I have a problem with the lightmaps in a project i am working on. It is done by another and i m remaking some parts of it. I imported some new models in the game and the colors look a bit darker than the original files. I beleive this has to do with the lightmaps of the scene that are already baked with the old models so i m trying to find a way to rebake the lights. My main issue is this:

The models are character prefabs that instantiate via code, so they are not in the main scene when the game starts. How do i make sure that they are lit correctly? Do i have to place the prefabs in the scene and bake the lights with them in and then remove them or do i just bake the lights again with them sitting in my assets folder and they work fine when instansiated?

Maybe its another issue that doesnt have to do with lightmaps and i missing something else?

Thank you in advance!!

[deft fiber]

Lightmap data is tied to scene geometry
To tie it to prefabs you need a custom system such as this
https://github.com/Ayfel/PrefabLightmapping/blob/master/PrefabLightmapData.cs

[carmine dove]

Thnx mate i ll check this out

[devout sail]

I created a project in a 2021.3 version, had to upgrade unity versions (still within 2021.3), and then reopened my project. The lighting looks different in the scene than in the game! My probuilder blocks used to have lights on the side of them, which now has nothing - it's just black

[limber delta]

Are those set to static and have you baked the lights?

[delicate snow]

Look at the bottom right triangle of the center hexagon. Its brightness seems to snap to values on the game view, but seems smooth on the scene view.

[deft fiber]

Both appear to "snap" in a similar way
If I'm looking at the right thing, I would say it's not lag, but probably color rendering limitations
May help to know what render pipeline you're using and if you're on forward or deferred rendering path

And which color space your project is using

[golden mantle]

How can I generate lightmap UVs if I only have mesh-files (.asset-files)? No fbx, obj etc.

[delicate snow]

I am using URP. I am using a forward renderer. Only lighting is a directional light. Gamma color space.
The video compression makes it hard to tell, but the lighting on the left updates more frequently, creating a smoother transition between shades.

[dire dove]

Does having a light with zero intensity and culling set to nothing have any performance hit at all? I basically just want my sun light to inform the dynamic skydome of it's rotation, but not actually contribute anything to the scene

[dull marlin]

What's the best way to put photos in a photo frame? I tried Canvas but it highlights the image and causes emission.

And a material per-frame is very tedious, especially when I gotta rotate each one.

[deft fiber]

Be more specific; in 2D, 3D or UI, with what requirements and how is this related to lighting

[carmine dove]

Hey guys! I m trying to configure the lights of my scene. I decided to use one mixed directional light, so that i have baked light for the props and realtime light for the characters. I have an issue where after baking the lights some of the static models start to look roundish like their geometry is not showing up correctly.

where the original model from Synty looks like that, you can see in the scene it looses the geometry

I have Generate Lightmap UVs on for those, and these are the settings of the prefabs MeshRenderer

Sorry for the wall of information

[dull marlin]

In 3D, and the image is giving off emission which I figured is probably related to lighting

[deft fiber]

You would normally swap one material for another if you want to change a texture

The material reference of a mesh renderer, to be exact

Hard to guess why you'd have to do that every frame or rotate it

Visible emission is usually post processing bloom

[dull marlin]

The material under it doesn’t have any emission

It was just a standard cube

[devout sail]

It looks like the the problem was something around that... I had selected auto generate lighting (in the lighting settings). So once I unselected that it worked!

[devout sail]

appreciate the assistance/help!

[timber lichen]

Can you tell me if you see something weird with this shadow settings?

I got sprites casting shadows. With this settings the shadows are ok, but increasing the first half of Cascade Splits just by a few points, they looks horribly pixelated

[deft fiber]

Shadow distance of 3000 is bonkers

[timber lichen]

Is that number in world units?

[deft fiber]

Yes

[timber lichen]

I knew there was something wrong

I put 70

Is 4 cascades heavy on performance vs 2 cascades?

[deft fiber]

I don't know what the cost of cascades is and it likely varies by platform, so you'd have to profile the difference
Usually more cascades means you can get by with less resolution for the distance though

[storm flax]

more cascades means more draw calls and higher memory usage, but the impact can be negligible

it all depends on the user’s hardware and the scene being processed

[twilit elm]

What would be the best way to deal with a large array (20x20 of lights) without performance dropping too low or dealing with not the best baking?

Is there a way for lights to switch between baked and realtime based on distance to the camera?

[twilit elm]

oh i've fixed the problem now sorry

[limber delta]

What did you do? Just curious

[twilit elm]

just turn the lights on or off depending if theyre within a certain range of a player

gives a cool effect but wont look good in every game

[twilit elm]

^

[limber delta]

Ah right. nice

[visual nimbus]

Hello, I have a simple 3d game with 3d lighting but I am using SpriteRenders with no 3d objects. As you can see, my shadows are super low poly / blocky. They are not pixelated like I see the defaults working, but the outline of my tree is...simplified.

I fiddled with all the shadows settings and I can't seem to fix this. Any thoughts what is happening? Thank you.

[upper fable]

Use alpha clipping for the trees, that should make the transparent be clipped for the shadowmap rendering too

The reason its so blocky is that the blocky shape is the actual shape of the 3d mesh rendered in which the sprite texture is projected into. If the shader that renders into shadowmap doesnt discard the transparent pixels the whole 3d mesh is rendered to the shadow map

[visual nimbus]

you beautiful human being, that worked!

[twilit hearth]

Hello. I have got huge scene in unity. 6 islands. My pc can render lights for 2 maximum once. If i turn on more then it crashes .. So is it possible to save somehow bake data on the already baked islands ? because when that which is off unity rebake and destroy maps. i tryed to export them and reimport but it didnt work :/

[daring haven]

I am trying to learn lighting better, and so far the answer seems to be "don't have huge scenes!"

[twilit hearth]

Yah.. unfortunately that's how it is, jot my choice and can't change it 😆

[lime river]

Yo whenever I rotate or turn my object it turns a different color?

[twilit hearth]

Have you got lights in scene? What view mode you have?

[lime river]

I only got a Directional light

[twilit hearth]

You have material with shader or just material ? And what's the settings?

Maybe you have too much metalness

[lime river]

I will send a video

[twilit hearth]

Kk

[lime river]

@twilit hearth

srry for the audio i was in a call

[twilit hearth]

Thats just light and shadow 😄😄

[lime river]

How do I fix

Theres no shadows

[twilit hearth]

There is directional light it lights from up to down .. so up side is light and down side of object is in the shadow

Thats why it's dark

[lime river]

Soooo how fix

[twilit hearth]

Try to turn off cast shadows in light settings

Or get rig of light

Or put another down to it lights also scene from down

[lime river]

Wait, turn off shadowns on the directional light

[twilit hearth]

Or on object trn of cast shadows

[lime river]

how do u do it on a object

Oh

I figured it out

but it did not fix it

[twilit hearth]

Nice 😄

Oh

Soo if other object don't do that try to copy settings in inspectorb

Fot the one that do that

[lime river]

wat

[twilit hearth]

Look you have got light in scene .. your object don't change color your object is from one side on light and other side in dark.. so it behaves hot it suppose to behave .. so you need to turn off lights for that object I'm not in my computer don't know where it is.. somewhere in inspector

[deft fiber]

@lime river The materal needs to be using an unlit shader to fully disable shading from received light

[river parrot]

Please help, i imported Azure Nature and now all my scenes got this weird Bug. Using URP

Water is not causing this cause in demo secene is same

If there isnt Object behind Tree tree behaves strange transparent

When i reload scene its fixt, but after play it will get f. again. I Think it has to do someting with Unistorm

[deft fiber]

@river parrot You'd have to look at support channels or guides of the assets you're using
It's not related to lighting but something to do with render order

It's unlikely to find someone here who has and knows those exact assets

[random grove]

check the tree foliage shader and see if it's on render pass geometry and not transparent

[tiny kelp]

i'm making a prop that has a light that i want to be able to be switched on and off, do i do that in my blender project or in unity?

[deft fiber]

In Unity

[tiny kelp]

the light and the on/off function?

[deft fiber]

Yes
Lights can be exported from blender to unity within fbx, but I don't know anyone who actually prefers to do it that way
If the light is entirely based on emissive textures instead of light objects, there may be some steps best taken on blender side first, but I don't know your specific case

[tiny kelp]

my prop is a PC that will have a thin RGB light going down the front, i also want it to be compatible with ray tracing

[deft fiber]

Then you'll probably want emissive textures for it, not lights

[tiny kelp]

in what program? substance painter?

[deft fiber]

An emission texture is just an image with nothing special about it
You can make them in substance painter or mspaint all the same

[tiny kelp]

what about turning it on and off? is it just switching the model between a version with it off and one with it on?

[quaint river]

Hey!

So I have NO knowledge of lighting , however when adding lighting to my scene and auto generating my lightmaps , I have a few pieces that are very dark and others that are very light. I am using the same pieces multiple times , and all pieces are using a single trimsheet, so the same material.

[eager agate]

guys, is there a way to handle Lightmapping in the build? because as it is a unityEditor class, it accuses me of an error when compiling

@modest patio as I've seen you recommend magic, I'm using it and Lightmapping.lightingDataAsset to configure the ambient light in execution mode, but I have problems using this command in build, do you know if there is any solution?

[modest patio]

Are they all flagged as static? Also if you have reflection probes in your scene makes sure there are no gaps between each of the volumes.

[modest patio]

Sorry man cant help

[quaint river]

@modest patio They are indeed. I will just double check, but I believe they all are

[modest patio]

have you tried deleted your baked light data and doing a fresh bake?

[quaint river]

I have not, no. Where would I do this?

[modest patio]

little arrow at side of generate lighting button.

click it, select delete baked data. Also turn off Progressive update and multiple importance - buggy as hell, you dont need them.

[eager agate]

ah ok, thanks

[quaint river]

Let me give that a go quickly

[modest patio]

also make sure youre using the GPU lightmapper. Bakes will be 10 times faster

[quaint river]

I am currently !

so I have deleted all y light map data

ignore the pink untextured posts

[modest patio]

In your lighting settings above you have it set to progressive CPU?

[quaint river]

nope

GPU

[modest patio]

I was referring to this. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/497873729578336276/1031246286512468018/unknown.png?width=1705&height=910

[modest patio]

Turn off Progressive update and multiple importance - buggy as hell, you dont need them.

[quaint river]

got it. will rebake now

[modest patio]

Also dont forget you can add ambient occlusion in your bake. Just check it on if you want nice contact shadows.

[quaint river]

I was planning on doing it once I got the issue sorted. Less things to check when error appear 😅

hmmm

Same issue and at the same assets

really weird

even when deleting and re-adding them , it's the same issues

[modest patio]

Odd. Can you click on one of the objects and let me have a look in your inspector?

[quaint river]

sure

[modest patio]

ya sure its static?

click little arrow side of static let me see

Also pump up your direct samples to 256 do another bake

32 is very low

[modest patio]

just to test make sure everything is on and rebake

[quaint river]

I will do it with just 2 problematic pieces.

2sec

[modest patio]

make sure you up your direct samples

[quaint river]

I have

to 256

[modest patio]

cool

[quaint river]

same issue and all the dark pieces here have everything on

[modest patio]

So you selected all your meshes and click the static button so everything was static?

[quaint river]

correct yes.

I just cleared all bake data and giving it another shot

Same issue

Really frustrating .. all the assets are exactly the same 😅

[modest patio]

Sorry man, without having the project in front of me I cant think of anything else. If all the meshes are set to static, have the same material applied they should bake fine.

[quaint river]

No worries! I appreciate the attempt

I am rather puzzled myself

[golden mantle]

Getting these dark puddles on my Specular Lightmaps with Filamented Shader with Bakery 1.9 (updated to latest patch). What should I do? Using RNM Directional Mode in this example.

[empty rain]

Is there a way to make a sort of invisible wall / collider that light cannot get past? tried googling, just showed me how to black out entire scenes
Going to be more specific here: I have an area that I want to be completely dark regardless of outside lighting until you turn on the light inside of the area

[empty rain]

Figured it out, mb

[timber lichen]

Hi,
I wonder if someone could help me with the following question:
I have a house in my game with rooms. I want to have normal lightning for each room. You can turn the light on or off or even Dim the lights.
The problem is, when using realtime lightning, like spots or points, the light because of the range will go throught the room to other rooms. When I decrease the range it will not be enough light. I could this with baked Area light, but I will not be able to use it in realtime mode to dim the light for example.
What solutions do I have make the bright enough and keep the light in the same room(not going through walls)?

[daring haven]

Have you tried using lights that cast shadows? They don't go through walls (just open doorways etc).

[timber lichen]

Yes I tried it but they still going through the wall. I will try it again but that was something I found on other forums. But it didn't worked :/

[deft fiber]

Although shadow casting costs quite a bit of performance that should deal with the problem
What do you mean by "still going through the wall"

[timber lichen]

Whats the namè of a light that u can see when ur against a wall?

I'll show you an example asap

Left top I placed a point light with shadow turned on

right top you can see that part of the light is going through the walls

At the bottom I show also the room that is above it and it also shows the light is going through the ceiling

[timber lichen]

I'm using URP

[little condor]

Which version of URP? Point light shadows were only introduced in 2021.1.9 and higher.

From the look of your living room, there aren't any shadows being cast.

[timber lichen]

@little condor
Unity version:

and URP version:
Version 12.1.7 - September 19, 2022

Hey how do you guys make realistic shadows

[native scroll]

There is a seam in forward rendering path between these modules

but it is gone when i choose deferred

anyone knows why is forward is like this?

[native scroll]

if you know please tag me

[deft fiber]

I don't see any clues why the shadows aren't working here
Make sure the meshes have shadow casting enabled
I'd try to experiment with the shadows in a test scene with default cubes to try to isolate the problem

[tiny kelp]

i'm making a prop with a small rectangular light on it, if i use the rectangle shaped area light can i snap it to an individual face of the mesh?

[timber lichen]

Thanks, I tried it in the past with just simple cubes buidling two rooms and I know I had the same issues there.
I can try it again with the knowledge that I have now.

[deft fiber]

If you make two cubes and a light, all with shadow casting enabled, light should be blocked from passed through the cubes
If it doesn't, it may be that point light shadows are disabled from quality settings, or something else

Some types of shadow errors are reported in the console

[timber lichen]

yes I remember those errors:

Reduced additional punctual light shadows resolution by 4 to make 8 shadow maps fit in the 512x512 shadow atlas. To avoid this, increase shadow atlas size, decrease big shadow resolutions, or reduce the number of shadow maps active in the same frame
UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

I'll going to make a test scene and try it first with normal cubes

[deft fiber]

That one shouldn't break the shadows, just reduce their resolution
It suggests that some shadow casting is happening at least

[timber lichen]

@deft fiber

I tried with cusbe ans played with the shadow resolutions

but nothing is helping

I kept the setting default, only enabled cast shadow in the urp settings

but that only helps a little bit

I wonder how other developers are doing it. I know baking is one option but it limits on what you can do with it like dimming the lights would be impossible because it's static

[deft fiber]

aside from some minor leaking and maybe some resolution/atlas issue it looks to be working

Another option besides shadow casting and baking is to use light layers strategically

[timber lichen]

In what sense? Do you have an example?

[deft fiber]

I don't know if there are guides for the specific technique, but I did make an example a while back when this topic came up last #1024073431660101672 message

[little condor]

I created a similar setup to what I see in your screenshots. The only way I could replicate the light leak is by changing the 'Near plane' value on the Point light > shadows component to be less than 1.

The version of URP I used was 2021.3.2f1 too. Not sure if that makes a difference.

[tiny kelp]

any help?

[little condor]

I'm not sure you mean by 'snap' it to an individual face, but you would normally add the light as a child to the gameobject and arrange it so the light is in the correct position/rotation, then save the model as a prefab.

[timber lichen]

I will try it with a clean scene urp just to be sure.
I played with the shadow but I put it on 1 or 0 to make the leak less. You only have the issue when your light is a bit closer to the wall and you need to bright up the whole room. It also happens with spotlights.

[modest patio]

Use an emissive material instead of an area light. You'll need to open up your model in a 3D application and assign a material ID to the face you want to be lit, then reimport into unity which will add a material element where you can apply an emissive material. Emissive materials act the same as an area light.

[tiny kelp]

move it to the exact position of a face, it's called snap in blender

[still dome]

Hello, I need some ideas on the implementation of the following: how to make a global illumination for a procedurally generated level with the following restrictions: the level consists of pre-prepared rooms, there are doors on the borders between the rooms that open. I looked into the solution used in Blades - The Elder Scrolls, where they used to mix lightmaps between rooms, however in my case there is an option in the rooms to turn off the light (interpolation between lightmap and dark) for each individually, given the presence of doors, I think option with mixing cards between rooms is not correct. I also need a light probe proxy volume, is it possible to interpolate it in case of turning on / off the light?
I will be glad for any help
Platform: android/ios

[flint copper]

direcbanding

[tiny kelp]

anyone?

[thorny goblet]

https://i.imgur.com/gFRuy9z.png How can i make lighting come from the window or is it not needed?

[plush notch]

Hi! I think I'm missing something. I've set my graphics settings to "Hard Shadows Only" and rebuilt lighting, but all of my shadows are still soft.
There is only one quality level and yet soft shadows are still being drawn instead of hard shadows. Thanks for any help.

[deft fiber]

@tiny kelp Holding V key lets you snap to vertices
I'm not sure if that's what you actually want tough

[daring haven]

Could it be related to resolution of shadows rather than hard/soft?

[deft fiber]

Hard shadows still have bilinear filtering, soft shadows have some extra filtering on top of that
I believe you'd have to alter the shadow code itself to implement nearest-neighbor filtering instead

[plush notch]

Oh, ok, thanks. I want a solid silhouette to be drawn around the object shape. I think this is called or is similar to a toon shadow.

[deft fiber]

Ah, the mesh surface's shading is entirely unrelated to shadow quality / shadow casting in general
You'll want a "toon shader" or a "cel shader"

[plush notch]

the shadow on the ground, not on the mesh

To get hard shadows on the mesh I wouldn't be using smooth shade faces.

[tiny kelp]

can i only snap to vertices along a certain axis?

[deft fiber]

Probably not

[tiny kelp]

can i at least see the coordinates of the vertex i want to snap to?

[daring haven]

I had some luck increasing the shadow resolution - I cranked it up to 4096 and set everything to max. The shadows came out much cleaner. On the light source, cast shadows, pick to max quality setting you can afford.

[plush notch]

I can do that but my game consists of a ton of physics objects moving around on screen so hard shadows are the best default option for good looking and good performance.

So rendering a lot of soft shadows is something I'd like to avoid.

[tiny kelp]

if i put a light inside my mesh will it shine though it?

[daring haven]

If you have alpha clipping on I think it will. (If you scroll back a few days I think, someone had a similar question with a green screenshot and a tree)

[tiny kelp]

so having it off will prevent it? cause i don't want light shining through

[daring haven]

I think the mesh will block it, even if the texture is clear - as long as alpha cutoff is not in effect. (But that is from the brief discussion a few days back - I have not tried it)

[deft fiber]

No
PolyBrush or ProBuilder might allow you to see vertex positions in world space, but generally Unity doesn't have that kind of editing functionality

[deft fiber]

It will, though it won't illuminate the surface itself
You probably should describe the effect you want in detail instead of running through the potential solutions though us one by one
The last time I told you to use emissive textures, did that work out at all?

[gilded sapphire]

Any idea on pixelated soft shadows? (It only happens in the build)

[whole bramble]

just bake it.

[gilded sapphire]

I did

[whole bramble]

have you checked soft shadows on directional light?

[chilly kettle]

How big is the mesh/uv where the shadow is drawn on?

[gilded sapphire]

The gameobject?

0.4

But if I go in playmode in editor the shadows are high quality

only the build is pixels

[chilly kettle]

can you show the lightmap of the gameobject?

[gilded sapphire]

its a tree

[chilly kettle]

Nope. the lightmap will be on the ground.

And im quite sure, its not baked

[gilded sapphire]

this stuff?

[chilly kettle]

Yeah. All Black 😄

[gilded sapphire]

ill clear the baked data and rebake

[chilly kettle]

But what i mean is the lightmap that is attached to the ground.
If you click the ground there should be a lightmap attacked to the mesh renderer

[gilded sapphire]

Before I do this hour bake, whats the optimal bake settings to look out for to make sure itll be nice?

[chilly kettle]

First. you should always start with a very low bake. Like 2-5 Texels

[gilded sapphire]

The ground is the terrain

[chilly kettle]

Well.. The terrain is not set to static. That means it cant be baked

you have realtime shadows

[gilded sapphire]

ah thats right, my bad

[chilly kettle]

And your Lightsource is also realtime

[gilded sapphire]

well if its realtime itll be better for the player character moving and moving plants yea?

[chilly kettle]

Sure, but bad for performance

[gilded sapphire]

ill set the directional light to mixed

[chilly kettle]

ill recommend watching a tutorial ^^
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnetI4-dNY&t=2520s

that one is great

[gilded sapphire]

Sounds good!

[chilly kettle]

Lighting is a complex part of unity ^^

[gilded sapphire]

it sucks. unity is a pain when it comes to graphics

[whole bramble]

well

Finally i've found your solution

just go to project setting>Quality> Turn Shadow Projection from 'Stable Fit' to 'Close Fit'

Thats all...

and yeah...do this in all parameters.... Low, Medium, High.... all

[tiny kelp]

from what i've seen emissive light won't actually bounce off surfaces like ray traced light should

i'm trying to make it for an RBG light on a PC

[little condor]

Emissive materials need to be baked before their light can effect other gameobjects, unless you enable raytracing, then they're real time. Normal lights like point and area lights don't bounce off surfaces in real time either.

If you're using HDRP, you could try screenspace global illumination, but it might not be perfect. Or you could fake it by adding multiple non-shadow casting lights to the inside of you computer case and writing a script to change the colours at runtime.

[minor umbra]

why do my trees look like this

[deft fiber]

Hmm you mean why are they green or why are they pointy?

[minor umbra]

Why is one side darker and other lighter?

there is some that have the darker side facing light but still dark

[deft fiber]

That's a better description
I don't recognize the issue, but you could troubleshoot it by testing if it happens with other materials or the same mesh, or with the same material on different meshes
Also, rotating the tree to see if the "seam" rotates with it or stays in place relative to light direction may be a clue as well

[daring haven]

I assume there is no LOD etc turning trees into billboards (so have no depth for light to shine on from the side)?

I would have guessed the positioning of the light since all the light green sides seem to be facing one point.

[minor umbra]

i have 0 knowledge with lighting so idk what you are talking about sorry

[deft fiber]

They don't look like billboards so I wouldn't worry about that
I very much recommend raising your knowledge above 0 or else this process will be painful
Lighting is a complex topic but important to understand

[minor umbra]

i tried rotating and it lights it up but as soon as i rotate a little the other side instantly becomes darker

[quaint river]

Hey! I have been having a really hard time with the lighitng in Unity . Every time I bake the lights, some assets just appear much darker than others.

1. There are 10 or so assets duplicated around the entire level
2. There is 1 single trimsheet texture texturing the entire level
3. I have tried messing with the light map resolutions, ensured no UV light map overlapping
4. I have tried turning it off and on again.
   N.B I have a single light source and that is the directional light from outside .

If anyone has any ideas, and they are free a little later today (Currently at my 9-5) and willing to help, please message me. Or , just drop some ideas . Please and thank you

[tiny kelp]

so i need to use HDRP for the light to be ray traced in real time?

[little condor]

If you want to use RTX raytracing, then yes, HDRP is required. Just be aware that those who play your game will need an RTX video card too.

[tiny kelp]

with what type of light?

[little condor]

Any light; point, area, directional and emissive materials, etc. From my experiments anyway.

[tiny kelp]

if i were to use emissive it has to be from unity right? or would an emissive map from substance painter also work?

[little condor]

Substance can pack and export to a Unity compatible material, (or is it just a texture set?), they are just textures anyway. It worked when I used it a few years ago, so I assume that still works.

[minor umbra]

how can i let light go trough something? like an object

i want the car head lights to go trough the finish

and for it not to block them until the car passes it

[balmy badger]

So I have realtime reflection probes in my game. I only update them once at the start of the game (dynamically arranged room prefabs). The rooms are all mesh merged so there aren't that many meshes per room. They all share one material (texture arrays and such). It seems all the reflection probes bake perfectly, but the android build.. sometimes the meshes in the furthest part of the level from the start position will start turning black. I can re-render the probes manually and it fixes the room you're in, but somewhere else in the level the meshes will be black also.

I've found nothing that would allow me to "refresh" what reflection probes the meshs use. Has anyone ever seen anything like this? and if so how did you fix it?

Unity 2020.3.40f1

[little condor]

On your gameObject > Mesh Renderer component you can set Cast Shadows to 'off'. That will allow lights to pass through an object. You might have to set the material on your gameObject to be 'Unlit' to, so it doesn't receive light from the headlights.

[gilded sapphire]

How do you solve pixelated shadows. They are only pixels in the build

[daring haven]

Increase the shadow resolution? Makes shadows slower, but improves the resolution so less jaggies. The other way is to soften the shadow edges which hides the jaggies a bit.

[gilded sapphire]

both applied already, thats the outcome. ive fixed it by creating a new project and transfering stuff

[daring haven]

That is sad and scary (and resonates completely with me unfortunately!!!)

I spent hours last night try to work out why a camera rotated to a certain angle went black (it used to work a month ago when I last opened the project). I created a new sequence, copied all the tracks over, and it started working. No idea why. But its working, so onwards!

[granite jasper]

i messed up with the light when i generate light on GPU preview now there are no shadows and the lightning is dim idk how to revert back, i did genrate it again on enlighten but it's same

this was the result before i want this back can anyone help me pls

[uncut coral]

Hey, if I'm using one object multiple times and each scale is different in unity. Then baking lightmap will assign lightmap UVs acc to their sizes?

[hard grail]

Hi guys, is there aboslutely no way to get baked specular lighting in HDRP?

As soon as we bake lighting, we lose specular/metallic on all of our materials

Which defeats the point of PBR materials, and makes the game look 10 years old

I can't believe HDRP is marketed as a high-end solution and yet can't do specular highlights on materials with baked lighting.
The other end is to use real-time lights which are optimized terribly in HDRP (God forbid you use DX12)

[timber lichen]

How to make the areas without light less dark?

[deft fiber]

If you recall my last message that advice is relevant here as well #💥┃post-processing message

[timber lichen]

Thank you, I will check for that, I had been busy these days I could thank you enough!

[tiny kelp]

can i control how much the emissive light spreads? i'm using my pc as a reference it's rgb lights act like flash lights in the dark

[deft fiber]

You may recall our earlier discussion #archived-lighting message

[deft fiber]

https://youtu.be/YfnBaL6d4CE based on discussion around it it seems definitely possible but may require some tweaking

[thorny goblet]

How can i optimize Shadows to make them less intensive on my game. I want to make my game look as realistic as possible, while also making the game playable.

[little condor]

It depends on what kind of game you're making and the target platform you're aiming for. But the most realistic types of shadows without incurring a CPU/GPU overhead would be baking them to textures.

[little condor]

The intensity value of the emissive light component can do that. However, as you can see in the video that Spazi posted, emissive lights aren't calculated in a single frame so they tend to leave trails of light if the light object moves quickly.

If you want to have the RGB lights effect the soundings outside the PC, then perhaps using a light cookie might provide the effect you're after? See an example here:

https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-platform-rendering-visual-effects/tabs/3-universal-pipeline

[tiny kelp]

yeah i'm gonna use a light cookie, not sure what type of light to use to make it look accurate though

[thorny goblet]

ok

[fleet tiger]

does anyone know what might be the cause of these weird shadow glitches? also happens in some other spots on the map in editor when the camera gets too close

[deft fiber]

Polygons which are too long get cut off by light source clipping plane

Tweak the clipping distance or subdivide the polygons

[fleet tiger]

okay, thanks
odd that the clipping plane would be relevant for a directional light

[deft fiber]

Functionally it's an orthographic camera which clipping planes are relevant to as well

[fleet tiger]

I see

[split vault]

anyone understand what is happening here? this is happening for all lights in my scene. Whenever i move the camera the light changes very dramatically

[deft fiber]

Looks like light limits per mesh object

[split vault]

how does that work exactly? im pretty unfamiliar with lighting settings to be honest

got it. switching to deffered rending path fixed my problem, thanks anyway

[deft fiber]

If you search for light limits you can find that deferred rendering is one of the many ways to work around it
Each workaround has some tradeoffs though

Even on this server you can find many posts about it with that keyword

[timber lichen]

Anyone knows why this is happening?

Using urp and realtime lightninf with shadows

I have no clue how to solve it 😕

It happens also ingame

[split vault]

This looks like the EXACT problem ive just had

is your camera rendering set to deferred?

[timber lichen]

@split vault I will have a look

[limber delta]

To me this looks like an occlusion problem. Have you baked occlusion recently?

[timber lichen]

I'm not working with baked light currently, I removed it because I need to be able to switch the light on and off for each room

changes the urp settings from forwarded to deferred solved that problem @split vault But I have some strange shadow issues

[split vault]

oh, not sure then. im not good at lighting, but thats what fixed my issue

[timber lichen]

This is what happens now, those weird shadow

When I higher the shadow resolution it solve that light problem that was leaking through the wall only on specific angle

But in second video you can see it has very strange shadow

it not only looks weird but it also is noisy when moving around

lightning is hard, I tought it would be easier 🙂

[timber lichen]

@timber lichenlooks a good game

[timber lichen]

Thanks Gason 🙂 it's far from finished

[dawn cape]

Hey guys what would be the best way of lighting up a cityscape in hdrp at night,here is what i have below