archived-lighting

[timber lichen]

Oh so I don’t need to do much optimization for deferred lights, just some occlusion culling

[deft fiber]

Shadow casting has its own expense which might work a bit differently

[timber lichen]

Yeah I avoid shadows as much as possible

[main wolf]

Most likely using deferred rendering
Those static lights like building might simply use emission map

[deft fiber]

Blender's irradiance volumes are categorically the same as Unity's light probe groups/volumes

GTA5 had a whole team of graphics engineers designing the engine for this specific scenario so it's hard to say what optimizations and shortcuts they took

[limber delta]

Is anyone using Magic Light Probes (v1.95.6)? I struggle with it a lot. Have been following the quick tutorial basically, but applying it to my own scene instead. Unity 2021.3.0f1.

1. Created a volume (I've checked the "use volume bottom")
2. Tweaked some settings under Culling Options (color threshold and free volume filling rate)
3. Then calculate

I have one volume for the entire scene.

• Why does it place so many probes where there is no geometry? (first pic)
• Why are the probes placed inside the walls and also they are weirdly grouped together in the corner like that? (second pic)

Thanks

The probes placement seems so random as well. I'm probably not using it in the right way.

[karmic grove]

but you need to bake a whole lightmap first on all the meshes in the scene to get the probes working right? that's a big hassle for huge maps. Blender can just bake the probes without requiring that. Also in Unity one object only interpolates light probes to be used with one object where as Blender can make the light probes act almost like light sources that give nice volumetrically distributed GI on big objects like buildings or roads.

[dark jay]

how do i get cookie textures in hdrp to work

[dark jay]

nvm i got it

[deft fiber]

Blender has no baked lightmapping in the way Unity does, so the process is not really analoguous
Built-in RP at least can light meshes from multiple probes with the light probe proxy volume component
The new adaptive probe volume system I think is more flexible and works a bit more like Blender's probes

[karmic grove]

That looks more like it. I'll check it out. I hope they don't require baking lightmaps onto objects

[karmic grove]

aw, apparently not

What to not expect in this version:

Light probes variants management (e.g., baking and blending different lighting setups)
Use probe volumes to light an entire environment without lightmaps
Use probe volumes with dynamic lighting or dynamic environments

[deft fiber]

@karmic grove You can bake probes only if your lightmap static gameobjects receive lighting only form probes
But I don't think it's viable and doesn't actually save any raycasting work, because you have to bounce the rays off every surface whether you draw on the lightmap or not
Why do you want to do it in that specific way? I recall Blender's baking was kind of shoddy because it only works with probes

[karmic grove]

its much more advanced than the classic light probes unity uses that lights up the entire object if it's in proximity, it's way faster to bake irradiance probes and it saves you from baking any type of lightmaps and the waiting/file size they cause.

[stuck jetty]

You can do all the things you say except dynamic lighting in the current version of probe volume

However, you can use ssgi in hdrp or build a GI solution, like ssgi vxgi or sdfgi, for realtime lighting by yourself

[lost granite]

oh turns out the scene is really dark

tonemapping makes it clearer to see guess

cos its really hard to see the light bleed through when tonemapping is off

idk what i cxcan do about that tho

turning off the exposure control thing makes it visible again tho

turning ray traced shadows on the lights themselves helped a lot

i wish I could get the table to look as good and shiny as it does with path tracing

no idea why it got shinier

[deft fiber]

no idea why it got shinier

[gusty basin]

[urp] I want the point light to Not light up the street light:
I placed the object under a layer "DontLight" and than unchecked it on the point light but it still seems to light it.
I also added bloom post processing effect if it matters.
How can I remove the light from the streetlight?

[deft fiber]

@gusty basin which URP or editor version are you using?
Make sure that light layers are enabled in your current quality settings asset
And that you've excluded the correct layer for sure, as we can't see it here

[gusty basin]

Unity 2021.3.0f1
URP 12.1.6
I made sure the layers are right, here is the global render settings:

and assets:

Light layers were disabled, yea

[deft fiber]

iirc versions before that didn't have light layers which is why I asked
You're quite a few patches behind for 2021.3, so it's good to update if you can

[dark jay]

how do i get shadows for area lights?

tube area lights

[gusty moat]

does anyone have an idea why my light (hdrp) is not baking correctly? the right side of the door is the light how it should suppose to look like and on the left side its how it looks after baking (the light is just not there)... yes everything is static (light+map) I think it has something to do with my lighting settings but I have no clue

I have other light sources in the house and they are working, maybe I have too many lights? Is there a setting in lighting which I have to increase?

[dark jay]

new phasmophobia?

also no idea why

[gusty moat]

inspired yes 🙂 steam page is already online

[dark jay]

dayum nicee

looks awesome

[gusty moat]

thanks man I appreciate it!

I just have no idea about this bug, it costs me so much time

because everytime I want to look if I fixed it, I have to rebake it

[dark jay]

oh damn

and ig that takes a lot of time if u have many lights

[gusty moat]

but its actually just the new lights which are not baking anymore, the old lights in the house which I have since a long time, are wokring...

[dark jay]

try to reposition it and see if it still remains like that?

idk

[gusty moat]

thats a good idea but its not just that light, the other lights which I created afterwards arent working as well, so it has to be something with the settings and not the materials on the environment

[dark jay]

tbh i dont even know how to get shadows so i cant rly help u

[gusty moat]

thanks anyway

[gusty moat]

if you want to see more of it, you can search for "paratives" 😉

[dark jay]

damn that looks sick

[gusty moat]

appreciate it!

[dark jay]

btw i think something like this for the flashlight would look cool

[gusty moat]

yes I thought about that as well. For now I just have a simple light without a texture/pattern, Im going to save that for later, gonna see then if its better or not, thanks!

[solid creek]

Has anyone gotten this "By Design" resolution to work for 2D lighting? I believe it's an actual bug...
https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/2d-urp-lights-disappear-when-the-light-gets-closer-to-the-edge-of-the-scene-view

[gusty basin]

Enabling them didn't do much for me, I will look more on it online one day

And the newest version throws a lot of error that I am never in the mood to deal with, This one works perfect for me so I will stay with it

Thanks anyways 🙂

[tardy jay]

Hey, I've been struggling with a weird lighting issue for a while now and have had no luck in fixing it. My lights appear to be battling each other, like its a z-indexing fight or something. Depending on where the camera is, one light will overrule the other, and the failed one will disable. This happens both in the editor and in-game.

I've done a fair bit of Googling and troubleshooting (increasing pipeline pixel limit, messing with lighting GameObject properties, editing quality settings, changing rendering pipelines, etc), but nothing has seemed to help. I recently converted my project from the built-in rendering pipeline to URP, though this issue was persistent before and after that conversion.

If anyone knows what may be causing this, I would appreciate any assistance. Thanks!

https://i.imgur.com/3036HYP.gif

[deft fiber]

Looks like pixel light limits (which are per mesh)
Built-in RP has a much higher maximum limit than URP's 8
Also make sure the quality setting tier/asset which you are trying to modify is active

[tardy jay]

Ah, I had no idea that the pipeline created individual assets for each Quality setting; I was just messing with the generic URP asset. I found the one for the setting I was using, increased the pixel per object limit, and that solved my issue. Thank you so much!

[fierce lynx]

having a weird issue with light probes not affecting dynamic objects, except when viewed from very certain angles

[fierce lynx]

the black sphere is actually white, it's just not receiving any lighting from the light probes

only when I look at it from a specific angle does the light probe's effect snap on

goes away when I look at it from a different angle

[rotund anchor]

Hi! This is my first time playing with lighting in unity, so please forgive me if I get any of the terminology wrong;
Is there a way to fix this? There's this weird pixel outline showing up on my low poly model where it is casting shadows on itself- but only in the game camera view
https://i.tigercat2000.net/2023/01/Unity_dt3aG4q3WV.png
https://i.tigercat2000.net/2023/01/Unity_rrF3DOvDX2.png

I've already tried turning down the normal bias as is recommended for low poly models, but it doesn't change anything

I'm not sure what to even call this problem, so it's a bit difficult to google for solutions

[deft fiber]

Really hard to see from the picture, but it sounds like light leaking through flat shaded edges
This happens because in the eyes of the renderer they aren't connected at all in shadow casting

The problem should be visible when you move the scene view right up where it's occuring

If it's that specific problem, it shouldn't occur with smooth shaded meshes

You can force most meshes to be smooth shaded by setting Normals to calculate with a smoothing angle of 180 in mesh import settings
This should make the problem disappear

Since you probably want the flat shading, you can duplicate the mesh asset and have one of them recalculate normals as smooth like this

Then have both meshes overlap in the player prefab, with one (flat shaded) set to cast no shadows in the mesh renderer component, and the other (smooth shaded) to "shadows only"

[rotund anchor]

https://i.tigercat2000.net/2023/01/Unity_yjL4nF3nMs.mp4

I did try that, unfortunately it isn't happy

https://i.tigercat2000.net/2023/01/Unity_EtpHkwsfIu.png

replacing the mesh outright mooostly works?

https://i.tigercat2000.net/2023/01/Unity_4G57BetzYf.mp4

it's certainly better, but those little edges and outlines still show up for most of the rotation

https://i.tigercat2000.net/2023/01/Unity_zcsoF24mLa.mp4

also, it is definitely only the main camera that has the issue, not the editor camera

the two are aligned here and you can see in the game view PiP that there's the issue with shadows where there isn't in the editor view

sorry if that's not relevant, just wanted to clarify!

[deft fiber]

sorry if that s not relevant just wanted

[reef schooner]

Can somebody tell me why the outline of the play and optionsbutton is grey (The Image is white)

[halcyon sigil]

Unity lighting broken

That happens whenever I generate it

I'm using URP

When I set filtering to none it looks a bit better but still pretty weird and incorrect

[halcyon sigil]

Problem was emissive materials I believe

Gonna try to find out which one

[deft fiber]

Try toggling multiple importance sampling

Also check debug views for texel invalidity and UV overlap just incase there's more problems there

[hasty horizon]

How does baking work for objects with an LOD group? can i make these objects static and bake them?

I found some info on it, i think i can just make them static and bake it without a problem

[halcyon sigil]

I fixed it

[deft fiber]

so it was multiple importance sampling as I guesstimated?

[halcyon sigil]

No it ended up being some emissive material had no idea which one or how but it got fixed after I turned off emissions on every material.

[lyric condor]

I'm trying to bake prefab light map using this script.
https://github.com/Ayfel/PrefabLightmapping
But it always stuck in
waiting for user code in mscorlib.dll to finish executing
Is it supposed to be that long and should I keep waiting?

[arctic isle]

You may be more likely to find help on this in the github repository than here, unless someone has experience with this. Check out what versions of Unity this external tool is compatible with / verified with.

[lean cove]

Hey folks I'm having an odd problem with lighting in builds for macOS and iOS.
The lighting causes no issue with linux builds, so I dont think its an openGL issue.
I'm working with Unity version 2021.2.0f1 and the legacy render pipeline.

Here is an example of the issue (mac build on the left, win on the right). Any ideas what could be causing this?

[patent narwhal]

Whats wrong with my lightning? Using URP. Comes from Directional Light. I tried Light probes:

cleared baked data:

[shell jacinth]

Is there a way to make it so the global volume only target one layer and not affect everything ?

[deft fiber]

Yes, but note that volumes always affect cameras, not objects
(with the exception of local ambient lighting override and maybe some specific others in HDRP)

[woven jetty]

why this light is visible in scene but not in game

[woven jetty]

nvm i figured it out

[lyric condor]

Thanks for the tip, but I tried to bake again and left the pc on for several hours and it's actually baked. Just need some progress bar or something

[tawdry carbon]

Greetings,
I have the problem of those light reflections depending on what direction I'm moving my character.
I'd like completely remove those reflection altogether but I can't seem to figure out why they happen in the first place. The character has the Standard Shader applied with Metallic and Smoothness set to 0.

[tawdry carbon]

Think I figured it out. For some reason I had the Near Clip Plane of my camera set to -50 instead of just setting the camera offset. This resulted in some weird lighting behavior. After adjusting the near clip plane back to 0.001 and setting my camera offset accordingly everything seems to work fine.

[fleet tiger]

hi, I have 2 meshes that are made to perfectly line up when placed correctly next to eachother
is there any way to fix this kind of slight discrepancy in the lighting on their edge when baking lightmaps?

the "line" going up the stairs

[fleet tiger]

also, I just tried baking lights with a spot light in mixed mode with soft shadows, and the shadows don't actually appear despite being generated

nevermind it was URP settings
for some reason "cast shadow" is taken into account even with baked lighting

[next siren]

How do I make the shadows not do this

nvm

i fixed it

[fleet tiger]

is there any way to make lights in baked mode still light non-static object? I wanna use exclusively baked shadows but without dropping direct lighting entirely on non-statics

[scenic flume]

Question from a new unity user. I have this basement room, there a no lights and no windows. Why is it not pitch black? Im using HDRP with only realtime lighting.

[deft fiber]

In HDRP ambient lighting is defined in the visual environment volume override
Realtime lighting has no information about which parts of the level are occluded from ambient lighting, which is where you'd use either baked lighting or the indirect light controller volume component

[scenic flume]

That makes sense, thank you!

[deft fiber]

HDRP has a lot of options for ambient lighting so there may be more than those two I mentioned

[sturdy cargo]

Hi, I'm having an issue with a transparent materials reflective properties. As seen in the video, whenever both the scene camera and player camera move forwards/backwards from the light there's this "shimmer" sort of affect. I believe this is caused from the lighting around the scene reflecting onto the transparent light material, so I'm tryna figure out if there's a way I can get rid of the reflective properties without changing the transparency of the material.

[deft fiber]

What kind of transparent material is it exactly? Looks like Moiré patterns

[worthy forum]

How can I make lightprobes respect culling layers?

👀 it's just not possible ?

[formal veldt]

im trying to learn lighting, what settings would make this shadow sharper?

its just a cube with a directional light, baked

[main wolf]

Increase lightmap resolution or increase the floor's lightmap scale

[formal veldt]

ok

[sturdy cargo]

It is a thin rectangular prism object that sits over these 4 fluorescent light tubes, I added the cover to make it look more realistic, but the reflection doesn't help. As for the material, I've just made it have a transparent surface type, and then edited the opacity from there on.

[deft fiber]

Can you show the material properties?

[sturdy cargo]

I've tried changing the smoothness and metallic properties, but that also changes the transparency, making the effect of it useless.

[deft fiber]

Try disabling refraction to see if that's what's doing it

[sturdy cargo]

Changing the refraction model to any of the other options still has the glimmer looking effect, and changing the refraction model to none makes the material completely transparent, leaving no way to adjust the thickness properties. Then changing the index of refraction also doesn't do anything.

I can't seem to set the index refraction to zero, so I'm wondering if I can do that in any way, because the lower the index, the smaller the reflection looks.

[deft fiber]

That does confirm it's because of the refraction, which can struggle with tight spaces and downsampling of the opaque texture makes the shimmery moire patterns worse

So, you can test if the problems happen with the same glass in different places or conditions

Or live with refractionless transparency

[sturdy cargo]

Well I do actually use the same type of material on a smaller, squared light in my scene, and it's got no signs of moire patterns, though that could be because there aren't many light sources around it

is there anyway to edit the refraction properties in the material's shader properties itself?

[deft fiber]

I believe refraction doesn't refract light at all, it refracts pixels of the opaque texture so that's where the problem manifests

[dark jay]

why is my light clipping through the walls

here

[formal veldt]

is there a reason the baked lighting is so low quality and yet slower than realtime lighting? the first one is baked lighting, and yet it takes a long time to bake and has weird seams. the second I set the directional light to realtime and it updates instantly and is much more accurate. I don't understand why the option that takes time to build is significantly worse than the option that can update instantly

[arctic isle]

They are fundamentally different ways of calculating lighting in your scene. Correct setup for lightmapping leads to better results than just realtime. Baked lighting is also more performant at runtime.

[formal veldt]

the realtime looks so much better though

the only reason I considered switching to baked was because the shadow distance was bad on my realtime lights and I heard they are less performant

but it looks so much worse

why does it take so long to bake if the realtime can calculate instantly and look much better? I dont get it

[arctic isle]

Baked lighting also calculates indirect light

[formal veldt]

even if I turned the max bounces to 1 though it looks the same and takes the same amount of time

[upper fable]

Are the shadows enabled for that light?

[dark jay]

no

me pc explode :(

[formal veldt]

like if I can get results #2 instantly with realtime, what settings do I need to just write that result to the lightmap?

[upper fable]

Well, thats what shadows do, prevent light from going through objects

[dark jay]

is there any way to do it without them?

[arctic isle]

You can't really do that because the lightmaps are a calculation that is written into a lightmap whereas the realtime direct light is calculated only at runtime

[arctic isle]

You both want and don't want light?

What you're seeing there is a reflection, so maybe change the reflectiveness of your floor material 🤷‍♂️

[formal veldt]

but why is it faster to get better results?

like, if I'm baking the lightmap, it should surely be as fast as the calculations used for a realtime light. my GPU isn't just gonna work half as fast for no reason. so what specifically is causing the massive discrepency? the quality is significantly less accurate and the calculation time is significantly longer.

I can't imagine that just writing the data to disk is the majority of the time. I've saved a png file before it doesn't take 30 seconds

[arctic isle]

It is only better because you haven't set up your scene correctly.

[formal veldt]

how do I set it up correctly? I want the exact results that the realtime gives, just not realtime

[upper fable]

Thats what shadows do so not really, as giorgos said, decreasing/disabling reflectiveness could make the effect less noticeable but you may want to keep the material reflective to not ruin the visual quality

[dark jay]

alr

[arctic isle]

Just as a guess, turn down your indirect samples to 1, increase the lightmap resolution and set max bounces 1 for a start.

Just be warned that more lightmap resolution will lead to longer bake times, so don't go over 40ish

[formal veldt]

I don't understand why though. it can calculate instantly on my realtime light. why should saving that to disk take so much longer? is it not the same calculation, but one is simply saved and has to be static?

[arctic isle]

It's not just saving to disk. Realtime lighting is optimized to be a realtime calculation of direct light. Baked lighting samples the geometry in your scene, maps their uvs into texels, calculates light rays and bounces for indirect lighting (as well as volumetric light if you have light probes) then composites it and packs it into lightmaps and THEN it patches it into your scene.

[formal veldt]

well it looks bad so is there a way to just make the realtime lights static in some way just to save a bit of performance?

[arctic isle]

If you spend the time to set it up (follow a tutorial or guide) then it will look better. You can't write the direct light into lightmaps in any other way afaik.

[formal veldt]

I just dont understand what the technical limitation is. when I set a realtime directional light, I instantly have each face rendered as properly lit. if it's already rendering that lighting data, why can't it just save it to some kind of file, and then render it directly instead of calculating it again? like a cache

[arctic isle]

I'd recommend also taking a look here https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8467235

[arctic isle]

There is no technical limitation, it's just that realtime lights are made to be calculated in realtime and baked lights are made to be baked into the lightmaps. There is no cross-pollination because they are separate workflows.

[formal veldt]

but if the computer knows how to render a shadow on each face, it clearly has the information necessary to do that. why can't it just save that information instead of recalculating it each frame?

like the computer knows which parts of the geometry are in shadow, otherwise it couldn't render it

[arctic isle]

Because you are telling the computer to do so by setting the lights to realtime. It's expecting things to move around and it doesn't know if they have since the last frame.

[formal veldt]

I understand that, but why can't I just say calculate it once and then I confirm I will never move it

and then it stores the result of that calculation on disk

and just uses that

[arctic isle]

That's what baked lights are for, you just need to do a bit of extra leg work setting it up for your needs.

That's literally the contract of the baked lighting.

[formal veldt]

but clearly it's not using the same calculation, because it takes much longer than simply (realtime calculation + write result to disk)

it's obviously doing different math

[arctic isle]

Yes correct you can read up on how it works here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing

[formal veldt]

I don't want all the fancy stuff. I just want to bake the realtime calculation. is there a way I can just tell it to use the simple method?

[arctic isle]

And baked lighting does not contain realtime calculations. If you want that you need to use mixed lights

[formal veldt]

I dont want the calculation being done in real time

I just want the math used for the lights in picture 2 to be baked onto disk

rather than baking an entirely different more complicated light simulation

that takes longer and looks worse

[arctic isle]

There is a pinned message with resources and there's also this: https://forum.unity.com/threads/global-illumination-learning-resources.1290662/

I would suggest learning more about how the system works and then playing around until you have the results you are looking for.

[formal veldt]

I already know the results im looking for an unity has a way to get them

it just recalculates it every frame instead of baking it

I literally just want the results of the realtime light baked, instead of the results of the baked light, which is clearly using different math

like if it can already make accurate shadows in a single frame, I don't see any reason I can't just use that math to make the lightmap

instead of whatever the baked lights are doing

you could write code to just take a picture of every lit face and write a big texture for the whole map and that would probably be faster than whatever the baked lights are doing

maybe another way to put it: I want to make the baked lights calculate in the same way as the realtime lights

but still make a lightmap

which should just be writing the result of the calculation to a file

I don't understand the technical limitation for why it can't just run the math it used to create this result (which can be done in a single frame) to create the lightmap

I don't want to learn how the other rendering system works because I don't even want that rendering system. I don't need indirect bounces and ambient occlusion and all that stuff. I literally just want this but bake it as it is.

like I don't see why this result cannot be saved into a lightmap

cuz it sounds like you are telling me that this result can't be saved into a lightmap after a single frame of calculations, and it HAS to be saved only after minutes of calculations. which doesn't make sense, because the calculations are already done

like how I understand the realtime light to work is: it calculates data for each face, then uses that data to render

why can't I save that data?

might as well just set the shadow distance really high and leave it realtime since I can run it just fine

see, what im talking about is totally possible

I just want to use the calculations for the better result, which calculates faster

honestly, is the realtime cost that bad? im thinking of just increasing my shadow distance in the project settings

[deft fiber]

Realtime shadows depend on the camera perspective / frustum, and are not tied to texture pixels in any way
The percieved "high quality" is a result of that, as they only need to exist in the camera's view and aren't limited to a surface's lightmap resolution

[formal veldt]

interesting

[deft fiber]

Trying to replicate realtime shadows using lightmapping is kinda pointless because you'd rather use baked lightmapping to make use of its unique advantages

Such as bounce lighting and ambient occlusion

[formal veldt]

how much of a performance cost is it to use realtime lights for everything? I probably won't use as many as a realistic looking game since it's supposed to be retro style

[deft fiber]

They save a significant amount of performance in rendering because they're prerendered, but for that they trade disk size and load time as every surface's lighting needs to be stored and retrieved

Old games used both realtime and baked lights, both pixel and vertex types

[ebon skiff]

Hey all, trying to bake lighting for the first time in a small test scene. Unity is getting stuck right at the beginning of processing global illumination and repeatedly throwing the console error "failed to find geometry with hash 000000000000" Any ideas? It's not referencing a specific object so I'm struggling to find the issue. I've checked all baked objects as static and all lights as baked. I've used CPU and GPU iterations and cleared the GI cache. I've even disabled all the objects to be baked so its just lights, 4 cubes and two planes and still getting this error

[deft fiber]

Also, "mixed lighting" refers to multiple ways to combine realtime and baked lights to let them interact or to improve shadow quality, but it's not anything fundamentally different, just overlays them in various ways incurring costs of both usually

[deft fiber]

So, the error appears in a fresh project, in a scene with just default meshes, using CPU lightmapping? Is it an LTS editor version?

[ebon skiff]

Fresh project, I just created two planes and four cubes with textures for a basic room. I imported assets and arranged them but getting the error with everything disabled except the lights and 3d objects. I'll double check the version when I'm home but I do believe I'm using the newest LTS release

[arctic isle]

Are you using realtime GI, baked GI, or both?

[ebon skiff]

I started with realtime, tried switching the lights to baked only and turned off realtime GI. The hash reference of all zeros in the error is making it difficult to determine which object is causing the error but the unity primitives should be ok as is I'm guessing?

[arctic isle]

Did you stop the bake or did you allow it to finish?

(the realtime bake, that is)

[ebon skiff]

I let it run for about 45 minutes for a simple room with very low settings. It hadn't progressed at all and the bake time had gotten longer as it went, was at 14 hours at that point and still preparing while throwing that error every frame. Tried a few times with different settings, even unusably low ones and it never gets any progress

[arctic isle]

That error with "object with hash" comes from the Enlighten system which hashes objects based on their render settings / light settings before starting the bake.

An object with hash 000000000000 means that something went wrong with resolving the hashes from the GI Cache (where much of the Enlighten data is stored).

If you're sure you're using latest 2021.3, you shouldn't have an issue making a new scene, clearing the GI cache and baked data then trying again.

[ebon skiff]

I appreciate it! I'll definitely do more troubleshooting when I'm home. I've tried clearing the cache a few times but havent tried reimporting everything into a new scene yet to retry completely. Is there something I could be doing wrong that might be causing this? I tried to keep everything pretty basic so far for testing purposes

[arctic isle]

Especially with realtime GI I'd say don't mess with the scene after you've started a bake.

[ebon skiff]

I definitely try to leave it untouched after I start the bake. I'm curious, would auto generate lighting be beneficial to debug? From what I understand it regenerates the needed info each time a new object or light is added so I'd see the error immediately instead of after placing objects and starting the bake

[arctic isle]

If anything, auto generate is more prone to errors. What is important to note though is that Enlighten tries to pick up the bake where it left off whereas the Lightmapper will completely reset if there are changes in the scene.

[ebon skiff]

Good to know, thanks for all the help!

[formal veldt]

hm so realtime is based on the camera, which is dynamic which is why it can't be baked. so I just have to wait out a really high resolution lightmap. but baked lights can't come on and off, can they? how many flickering lights can I afford performance wise? what if there's like an escape sequence where an entire base is flashing red? is that gonna be a performance issue?

[ebon skiff]

Hey all, I'm thinking I might be missing something on my mesh import settings. In the lightmap view they appear with the checkers as if they are UVd for it, but I get an endless loop of a single error when I add even one mesh into my scene for light baking. When I click on the mesh in my assets to double check it, I can't actually see it's import settings. Am I missing something here?

[deft fiber]

What error is it? Where are the meshes from?

[fierce lynx]

Do I need to enable "realtime global illumination" for light probes to work?

or does baking with that enabled actually replace the need for light probes

(I can't find any reference to what the realtime global illumination actually does, in relation to the other aspects of the light baking process)

since I'm having issues with light probes not even working

[whole mural]

top = no light bake
bottom = 100% baked light

I'm using reflection probes, light probes, basically everything, why does the lighting look so bad in comparison? I'm losing all specularity on basically everything.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[arctic isle]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8466953

Switch the lights to mixed

[whole mural]

We're targeting quest 2 standalone, would this absolutely destroy performance? (Thanks for the tip btw)

[arctic isle]

It would have a pretty noticeable effect. An alternative is to use emissive proxies as suggested in the second solution in the link I posted.

[whole mural]

Fantastic, many thanks giorgos!

[arctic isle]

No, you don't. Light Probes store volumetric indirect light from static contributors (so bounced rays of light from the rest of the geometry in your scene) that can be used by dynamic (moving / animated) objects.

If you use Realtime GI, those probes will also store realtime coefficients for realtime indirect light. The two don't play super well together, so I'd suggest sticking to one.

So for baked GI, for probes to work, you need mixed or baked lights and some geometry to bounce light off of so that the probes catch the indirect rays.

[fierce lynx]

any idea on what to do if the light probes aren't working?

[arctic isle]

Please elaborate on "not working"

[fierce lynx]

can only see the lighting affecting the objects from specific angles

it's like their lighting is being culled from 99% of the angles viewed

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497873729578336276/1064612722806882338/image.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497873729578336276/1064612824317435955/image.png

[arctic isle]

Hmmm not quite sure what's going on here. Which Unity version are you using?

[fierce lynx]

2021

it's HDRP for what it's worth

so it could just be HDRP breaking

[arctic isle]

There isn't really any change that should be happening with viewing angles and baked lighting, which is why I think this might be HDRP doing something weird.

This is just baked GI, no realtime GI?

[fierce lynx]

yes

[arctic isle]

can you make the sphere receive GI from lightmaps and rebake?

(or have two spheres to compare, one probes, one maps)

[fierce lynx]

I have tried that, same result but I'll retry it

[fierce lynx]

that's a good idea too

[arctic isle]

My hunch is that this is an HDRP issue and not a light probes issue.

[soft crag]

Has anyone got this issue : I basically have a 2D light that turns on/off mutliples times via a coroutine in a short time. The 2D Light works in scene mode, turning it off/on manually multiples times works in runtime also. But doing it from the coroutine script makes the light as if it was off whereas it's actually on (I can see it's on from the inspector).

nervermind just found the issue

[deft fiber]

Did you have any luck recreating this problem in a primitive test scene, or better yet avoiding it?

[fierce lynx]

Tried a bunch of different things still no luck

I'll try more

[deft fiber]

No luck reproducing it or not reproducing it? Isolating the problem or failing to reproduce it are both "good" outcomes for troubleshooting

If you can isolate it to a fresh project and primitive test scene, you could report it as a bug and have it examined
Or if it the problem doesn't repeat there, then you know that some variable between those projects is breaking it

[fierce lynx]

I have an interesting development, I don't think it's related to light probes at all

I just baked my lighting even without light probes, using realtime GI in the lightbaking settings instead

same issue

where the balls were before they didn't have any light

when I put them in light

they are lit like this

[deft fiber]

I'm not sure what that tells us
Pretty much every type of lighting acts fundamentally differently so try to isolate that too when testing

And do make use of the primitive test scene

[fierce lynx]

yup light probes are working in the primitive test scene

[acoustic tide]

This might be a quick fix that i'm not aware of, but does anyone know what's causing this lighting artifact?

[dark jay]

hi i have real time and baked lights in my scene and all the baked ones randomly stopped working and idk how to fix them

[silver lynx]

How can I rotate the skybox?

[forest lake]

help, urp allows me to only see 8 lights at a time when the game contains much more, how do i disable the limit or make the limit bigger?

[deft fiber]

Usually you'd split the mesh into smaller segments
This allows parts of it to be culled as a bonus to save performance
Another option is the deferred rendering path which does remove the limit and makes lights cheaper, but doesn't support antialiasing or transparency
In newest editor versions there's the forward+ rendering path which should solve this problem for good, but it's experimental and may be buggy

[forest lake]

what versions?

[deft fiber]

https://portal.productboard.com/8ufdwj59ehtmsvxenjumxo82/c/261-forward-renderer-support

2022.2 Beta, URP 14

[forest lake]

thanks

[amber dust]

hi friends! tell me like i'm five, because i am a unity five year old. I would like to design some shadow puppets for my son, and thought it could be easy to play with in unity. i'm curious if there's a tutorial like this that's recommended, and especially curious if there is at all any way to export the shadow on the wall itself with some level of realistic expectation. anybody? /pray

[midnight grail]

Lightmapping and Lightbaking very noticable on my model, how can I fix this?

[midnight grail]

Problem summary: I have very noticeable seams when I bake my lighting.
If someone knows much about this, please help me in the thread above. Thank you

[wispy hatch]

What is your lightmap resolution. Do you have proper UVs for your objects?#

[midnight grail]

Proper UVs? Probably, yes. They do not overlap and are connected with the faces

I use phototextures

Lightmap resolution is on 100 texels per unit

Lightmap Padding is 2 texels

I wonder if there is actually a solution for this, since many people have this problem and never found an answer on the internet

[wispy hatch]

I mean the resolution of the output map

[midnight grail]

right, one moment

1024x1024

However, the photo texture isn't that resolution, it's actually bigger.

[wispy hatch]

Let me check on my latest project, I had to fiddle around with a lot of values on lightmaps

[midnight grail]

[wispy hatch]

So lightmap resolution of 100 is a lot, that should already give good results. Max lightmap size, I used to have 2048 over here. Did you try that?

[midnight grail]

Haven't tried that yet. I'll try it thanks

also, one more thing.

The application is for webgl, isn't it a bit too big for it?

Thanks for the help though, much appreciated.

[wispy hatch]

Haha, my project is for webgl too 😄 So 2048 was fine for me. Its being used in WebGL and VR on Quest 2. But 2048 is only the max size, if you ahve a lot of objects, unity will recreate multiple 2048x2048 textures which can be huge then. if its only one or two, that might be fine

[midnight grail]

Lol, we almost have the same project lol

but well, I have like a whole model of a real life building

so lots of interior objects and stuff like that. Is there a way to only bake the walls at 2048x2048 and all other objects at a lower resolution?

[wispy hatch]

That would give you even more weird seams and stuff if you try to create different "qualities" of shadows

[midnight grail]

makes sense ye

[wispy hatch]

You gotta gut it at some point if you are working with WebGL.

cut, not gut 😄

but you can try other software to bake better shadows, if thats an option. SUbstance Painter for example or even blender to prebake with better quality

[midnight grail]

Good idea actually

I mean I've made the whole model in Blender

so I could like bake them there?

Here's a hallway of the model I'm talking about by the way

[wispy hatch]

Is that baked in Unity?

[midnight grail]

No that is in Blender

but unbaked

in Unity without baked lighting it looks quite the same but it's very heavy on performance

[wispy hatch]

yeah realtime lighting is not gonna happen on webgl 😄

for now at least

I suggest trying to bake it in blender and use those maps, see how it turns out

[midnight grail]

Ay ay sir. Thanks I'll try it today

later, when I'm back from school lol

☕

[wispy hatch]

Alrighty, let us know whaqt you experienced. see ya later

[fierce lynx]

@deft fiber I figured out the culprit, but not how to fix it

I am absolutely flabbergasted

the terrain game object was causing the issue

if I disable the terrain light probes work again

now to figure out what in the terrain causes this

[deft fiber]

Huh, strange
But an important find!

[fierce lynx]

some people were reporting light layers as the issue with regards to terrain causing black lighting, but even after disabling it the issue persists

it's so strange, I can bake the lighting and it's all borked. But then as soon as I disable the terrain the light probes switch on

I've tried turning light layers off, tried changing the terrains shadow options

[midnight grail]

@deft fiber @wispy hatch
Can't believe it. Thank you guys so so much. The seams are hardly noticeable now when baked. Everything looks rather good now in Unity! :D

there would have been seams all over the place but now it's actually so smooth.

Now I just have to work out how to incorporate the moving doors, which I removed for test purposes

[fierce lynx]

@deft fiber I'm also noticing that when I DO disable the terrain, and the light probes appear to be influencing objects lighting again, that it's affecting ALL objects the same

so if i move one sphere next to a light, all the dynamic objects will have that light

cursed game engine i swear xD

I knew it would be a bad idea to try tackle technical stuff with my weird aura of decomposing any and all technology around me

[deft fiber]

I recommend doing a bug report for unity engineers to examine

[fierce lynx]

how would I go about that

do they usually respond quick?

[deft fiber]

In a few days usually
https://unity.com/releases/editor/qa/bug-reporting

I recall not even our Giorgos seemed to recognize the issue at all

[fierce lynx]

giorgios?

[humble valve]

My shadows only work in scene view and i dont know why. Its a directional light with shadows on and all the objects have cast shadows also on

[deft fiber]

I mean the local unity staff member who works with the lighting engine and stops by occasionally
I think he took a look at your issue some days ago but there's a chance I could've imagined that discussion

[night shell]

if your clipping plane is too high on your cameras that can cause an issue like that

[humble valve]

Thanks that was it, thank you a lot

[high zealot]

Hi guys,
I am trying to create an effect where whenever the player does an ultimate move I want the environment to be effected by a certain color. I have used a directional light where I have it inactivated and activate it when the player does the move. However it feels like I should not use lights for this. What do you think?

[dark jay]

how do i fix this

[dark jay]

?

[humble sandal]

Hello, i don't know much about lightning so i need some help. I have this closed box (scene view) and i want it to be completely black, but it still has light. As far as i know it is called ambient light. Can i somehow disable it for this box but keep for the whole scene? (i am using URP).

[vestal cypress]

How to achieve lighting setup as Unreal's Lumen in HDRP?

[deft fiber]

Unity doesn't have a Lumen equivalent system but under some conditions you can get similar results with Enlighten realtime GI and ray-traced GI

[thick burrow]

hello, a simple question, can i use emission maps on mobile? and if i can is it optimized or not?

[night shell]

depends but generally yes

you can use them on mobile

for optimization it might cost a bit more, but my advice is to use it very sparingly. Less is better

[manic prawn]

There is a way to disconnect the light probes from each others?

[halcyon sigil]

Hey! Weird little bug I'm having, so I am making realistic (ish) lighting for not the best hardware which is why I am baking lighting, gi, shadows, etc. but for some reason one certain mesh will not contribute to the baked lighting (No shadows being baked from this mesh) I have no clue why. I have made sure Static Shadow Caster is on and everything. This is not the most end of the world issue but just confusing.

Screenshots:

Example of one mesh not baking shadows

Properties for that mesh

[halcyon sigil]

(Lighting not baked in this screenshot)

[deft fiber]

They don't have "connections" so no
When getting lighting from light probes, the mesh finds the closest light probes and blends between them
The lines visualize which probes are closest to each other to help you predict how meshes will interpolate them

If you have no probes in the forest, meshes will have to use the probes from the towns

[manic prawn]

Oh, thanks!

I'm getting this lines in shadows when i bake the lighting, it's a big scene, I was trying to increase the lightmap resolution but my pc ran out of memory, any suggestions?

[deft fiber]

Disconnected geometry is problematic for baked lightmapping
If connecting them to have continuous UV space is not an option you can try Stitch Seams
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8467097

[topaz karma]

I am having a problem here. The shadows dont connect to the mesh. it nos bias, and i checked all forums, none of them have the solution

here is the light setting

[timber lichen]

How do I configure hdrp, so emissive materials light up other materials (like an the picture)? In my attempts, the materials are only affected by lights, not the light from emissve materials.
Image

[topaz karma]

Some help here please. I am on this more than 3 weeks.

[night shell]

floating shadows you say?

is it baked? almost looks like it is

but I'll assume its a realtime shadow

and in that case

I see that your biases are all at their lowest

the near plane as well (though the near plane being so close can also still cause issues)

but the only thing that comes to mind is either

1. your object is simply floating off the ground, therefore that's why the shadow doesn't connect because your object is floating above the ground so naturally of course the shadow won't connect

2. your model perhaps might have some funky business to where on the side that its lit, there are some backfaces and the light is bleeding through. A way to fix that would be to fix the models normals, or enable two sided shadow casting on the mesh renderer of the object

3. I also see the resolution of the shadow is pretty low, its possible that the object is too small to be represented by the shadow though for some reason I doubt that since I can still see a few pixels

4. its also possible your using a custom shader that potentially messes with the vertices on the object itself, and that custom shader doesn't have a proper shadow caster pass written for it so its incorrect

let me know @topaz karma since you haven't provided enough info

I'm just geussing here

[topaz karma]

It is realtime

the objects are touching the ground

and its not the resolution. its using the Standard shader. and the mesh is perfectly fine. in other projects it doesnt have this problem

[deft fiber]

Are there custom lighting assets in use? A specific render pipeline?

[topaz karma]

standard pipeline

💀

[night shell]

did you set the object as a two sided shadow caster?

[topaz karma]

yep

The same mesh, same texture, same prefab, in other project, doesnt have this problem

[night shell]

and it looks the same both in the scene view/game view?

[topaz karma]

yes

[night shell]

have you adjusted the near clipping plane also of the light rather than just simply reducing it?

[topaz karma]

yes

[topaz karma]

the low texture is just placeholder

here the same problem. all meshes have this problem

[night shell]

any ideas @deft fiber ?

pretty much ran through most of what I had, only thing I can think of is that the objects are too thin to be represented by the light

[topaz karma]

nope

[topaz karma]

this mesh here cast shadows, and has the same thin

[night shell]

yeah and its possible its too thin to be casting shdaows

but i'll rule that out

[topaz karma]

but it is casting shadows. but the shadows dont conect with the mesh

[night shell]

I am aware of that

[topaz karma]

solution: kill myself

[night shell]

your biases are set to 0 yeah?

[deft fiber]

Let's take this to a thread

[topaz karma]

yeah

[deft fiber]

but it is casting shadows but the

[little condor]

Emissive materials only effect other objects by either baking the lights onto static objects, or using raytracing.

To achieve the floor reflecting the glowing cube you could try adding a planar reflection probe, but I don't think it reflects the 'glow' emission, only the base colour of the object. Your floor should have a material with a roughness map so you get that diffuse looking reflection.

In short, there's quite a few steps to take.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@12.0/manual/Planar-Reflection-Probe.html

[deft fiber]

@timber lichen Screen space reflections are an option too, but to get something like the path traced emission in your example image, you need to set up ray tracing, as mentioned, or path tracing

https://youtu.be/ad9f_nKU0ZA

[ripe harbor]

What could be causing this light edge bleeding with my directional light?

[unreal mural]

baking

doing anything else is a shitload of work

[night shell]

Set your meshes to two sided shadow caster

[iron gyro]

hello guys, i need to your help i ask some questions;

i'm using urp and i try to make day night cycle but i have a problem. i rotate sun light by time but scene and object baked light map continues. I did research but I guess i couldn't find the right keyword. Do you have any resources or ideas on the subject? Thank you from now. I hope I was able to explain myself
https://streamable.com/fs341c

[iron gyro]

I did some more research and I think I found a way. I don't know if what I'm thinking is exactly right, but I came across an article in unity's documentation: "In order to accommodate for the day-night cycle, as HDRP and URP do not support the Realtime Global Illumination system (Enlighten): the day-night cycle would have to be handled with an Indirect Bake and a custom script that would, for instance, modulate the sun and indirect light intensity throughout the day." and then I wondered if it's possible to switch between the 2 lightmaps. my current plan is to add a lightmap toggle to the day and night cycle.

[ripe harbor]

Hey, my scene looks like this in the editor, but sometimes when I load it in game (using scene loading), the shadows are completely black, like this. What's going on? It seems to be random whether it shows up correctly or not, like it's random whether my UI actually receives events or not.

[upper fable]

You have to bake the ambient probe (enable light baking but with nothing to bake so only the ambient probe will be baked)

[ripe harbor]

in which lighting settings is that?

[upper fable]

Auto Generate

[ripe harbor]

ah, just hit generate?

[deft fiber]

Are you using realtime GI or baked GI, or neither? I don't think they can work together and just for generating an ambient probe you don't need to have either checked at all

Unless you intend to use those workflows, uncheck them and hit Generate

[deft fiber]

Sharp edges are seen as disconnected gaps by shadow casting
There's no single solution for it, but the problem doesn't occur with smooth shaded meshes so using "hardened" normals instead of sharp ones will help it, as well as extra smooth shadow meshes just for padding the gaps

Tweaking light bias values can help but is unlikely to fix it without causing other types of shadow issues

[ripe harbor]

i'll be honest. I'm not sure. I'd like to use mostly realtime with probes since large sections of my game are lit with a moving directional light, but im not 100% sure what's been going on since enlighten seems to not be a thing anymore. I'm not totally solid on how to manipulate unity's lighting system

[deft fiber]

Then best not to have the boxes checked

[pastel temple]

does anyone know how to achieve stepped lighting like in the pic for 2021 urp? ive found a decent number of resources on it but theyre all outdated / incomprehensible to a shader newbie like myself, so any sort of push in the right direction would be really amazing!!

i have a bunch of different shaders in my project (some bought, some custom, and some odd ones out like terrain), so would there be a way to apply this same effect to all of them? perhaps id have to do the lighting calculation as some sort of renderer feature?

[deft fiber]

It looks like in the shader there's a main directional light that works normally, and also a loop that finds light positions and multiplies color by distance to them along with a step function

[deft fiber]

I can tell you off the bat that modifying existing shaders will be easier than implementing entirely custom lighting pass

https://github.com/Cyanilux/URP_ShaderGraphCustomLighting This package gives you an example how to modify URP's lighting calculations within shaders, but it's not a simple thing by any stretch

[pastel temple]

this guy casually did it 6 years ago and here i am struggling after many hours lol

[pastel temple]

thanks a lot for the advice tho! i have been curious about writing shaders so maybe its time to dip my toes in

im honestly surprised something so conceptually simple can be so complex lol

[deft fiber]

Fingers crossed the process will get simpler when block shaders are released

The math itself is simple; get distance to lights and do a step function on that value, multiply
The hard part is speaking the language of URP
There's whole factory lines of data under the hood to get lights to show up

I've been trying to make custom lighting a bit like that to use along with shader graph but I kept running into vague errors because I don't understand the inner workings of URP even though I'm no stranger to shaders

[pastel temple]

in that case do you think i need to be using urp? its become my default but if im planning to go for a more stylised look perhaps its not worth it? im aiming for a more light hearted cartoony style like in the pics

whenever i decide on using one rp i start missing all the advantages of the others lol

the grass is always greener on the other side i guess

[deft fiber]

Not that much greener in the end!
You still need shader expertise to bend BiRP to your needs anyhow, unless you can find a fitting premade shader for each purpose

If you don't stray far out of the confines of what URP offers you it'll be easier than BiRP
Shader Graph is a very powerful tool even though it doesn't give much control over the lighting pipeline

#1 has no lighting, just unlit textures, so pipeline doesn't matter for workflow
#2 looks to have a very simple toon shader for everything which you can find premade URP solutions for
#3 Also has unlit textures, except with a shader that casts shadows and a ground that receives shadows, which I think can be done with SG without any custom code

I prefer URP because SG is very easy and effective tool within its limits, and because URP does a bunch of optimizations under the hood so you don't have to

[pastel temple]

ty a lot for the info! i guess its just a matter of trying things out and seeing whats achievable for me / what i can find premade solutions to

i think the built in rp has shadergraph now too right?

thanks for taking the time to explain everything to me btw

[deft fiber]

Right it does, though last time I checked it was a bit limited and cumbersome there

[pastel temple]

ahh right that doesnt surprise me lol

i swear this whole srp thing has been going on for years

im gonna go crazy if unity leave it half finished like they do with so much of their work lol

[deft fiber]

From what I understand URP shaders are inherently more complicated because of platform specific optimizations or something, so SG is meant to automate that messy part

It definitely seems like they're trying to leave BiRP behind for good

[pastel temple]

thats pretty promising to hear

hopefully itll mean more time is spent on the accessibility of urp

i best be off but again ty for spending your time helping people with this type of stuff

its rough doing it alone lol

good luck with your custom lighting stuff!!

[deft fiber]

Thanks! I'm trying to give the kind insight I would've needed when I started out and everything was overwhelming ^^

[supple turtle]

Hello guys, do you have any feedbacks about Prefab lightmap issues with unity 2020.3.39f1 ?
I'm using Prefab maker too and I can't obtain good rendering.
For the first use, the lightmap index is broken ( with uv offset).
For the second, I can see the rendered lighmaps preview, but I got a " failed to create" inside console window ( and a full black asset inside editor & playmode).

[manic prawn]

How I can increase the lightprobes intensity?

[mystic meteor]

Hey i need assistance from anyone:)) I'm having issues with lighting/baking and it's the 1 thing thats keeping me away from making my map,If anyone with any experience really could help me, that would be so great. :)!

Here's what i'm talking about basically, the Vrchat Material is suppose to be like Standard lite, which yknow a optimized version of Standard. My lighting in the picture is messed up and is glowing every where, While the light in the other 2nd picture is perfectly fine, that's the one with standard. I'm having a issue where it doesn't look like that ''the lighting without the big radius of light lmao''

I used a vrchat tutorial but even then, nothing helped so i just came to the experts of unity for help Lol

[mystic meteor]

nvm i fixed it

YESSSS

[deft fiber]

Glad you got it sorted!
VRChat specific things are usually very difficult for us to troubleshoot because they use a lot of VRChat specific systems and workflows, and are on a super outdated version of Unity to boot

[mystic meteor]

Mhm!! :))

[deft fiber]

What turned out to be the solution, for future reference?

[mystic meteor]

Well, it was just uh The standard that had the lights on it right? And the standard (light) Which had issues well, you need to bake lighting on the Standard first, then all the lights work and stay the same on the Standard light when you switch to quest textures 🙂

I'm not sure if thats the best way to explain it but, it was really simple LOL

[deft fiber]

I see ^^

[mystic meteor]

Good day to you Spazi ^^ !

[rapid lynx]

Why are my shadows looking purple when i use a normal map, and how do i lessen ambient occlusion

[slim harness]

why is the light going through the walls

[little condor]

Select the model and under the 'Mesh Renderer > lighting' section, set Cast Shadows to 'Two sided'. That might help a bit.

Increasing the shadow resolution of the light can help too.

[deft fiber]

Light leaking through sharp corners happens regardless of two sidedness

[deft fiber]

Your most effective options are to give the wall an outside surface to block light, or smooth shaded shadows-only geometry to pad the seams with

First: walls with outside surfaces
Second: a single two-sided surface only

Sharp corners are always seen as gaps by the shadow casting

[supple turtle]

Add some depth to your wall.
Use 3d block mesh around your scene to limit leak lighting.

[manic prawn]

I baked the light in my scene and some lightprobes gives too much intensity, i'm using URP

and also some light have tow "Universal Additional Light Data (script)" attached

[deft fiber]

What shader is the car's material using? That's where the light probes are applied

[somber acorn]

Hello
I'm having an issue with shadows in URP. Some shadows look jagged at lower resolution, as marked in the attached picture. But if I increase shadow resolution they become way too crisp.

I'm trying to make the shadows smooth like the reference image.

I adjusted shadow resolution, max distance, bias, and enabled soft shadows.
Is there something obvious I might've missed?

[deft fiber]

Shadow filtering is really expensive so without HDRP you're stuck with either jaggy shadows or excessively sharp shadows
One trick that situationally can help is to rotate your light source around its forward axis to align the shadow pixel grid to vertical and/or horizontal geometry

That can conceal the jaggy shadow pixels in places where they'd be too visible

[manic prawn]

@deft fiber I use URP/Lit

Maybe the project is broken because i used a tool which increase the lightprobe intensity and maybe the settings are broken now..

[arctic isle]

That does sound like a problem. If you remove the tool, Clear Baked Data and rebake (manual rebake not "Auto Generate") then it should reset.

[manic prawn]

I already done that but i still get the same result

[arctic isle]

Can you turn on the probe debug visualization (under Workflow Settings in the Lighting Window)? Set it to all probes no cells.

[manic prawn]

ok, wait a min, i need to bake the light again because i made some changes

[earnest sluice]

hi

how can i learn to make a good lightining for my game scene

is there any tutorial etc.

[arctic isle]

Check out the pinned message

[earnest sluice]

thanks :)

i founded

[manic prawn]

I think the problem is gone (or in another part of the map), i had some lightprobes right in the same position as the light spots and maybe that causing this issue

[arctic isle]

Fantastic! Yes, that is likely to cause bounce rays to be too short and the sample to be over-exposed, especially since you have a sparse grid of probes.

[manic prawn]

I'm generating the lightprobes with a script which place the lightprobes around lights, i have a large map so i can't do that by hand 😄
But how the problem is the car didn't get any light from lightprobes, should i place the lightprobes inside the light cone?

[arctic isle]

Yes but remember that light probes are only indirect light, meaning it's only going to contain bounce lighting from the street and nearby objects. If there are no objects nearby to receive indirect light from, the probes will remain dark.

[manic prawn]

ok , thank you for help!

[gentle sluice]

hello

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497872424281440267/1068562419095445524/sdsc.png

is it possible to get these points?

[earnest sluice]

guys how can i make four sided shadow like this

i did it with four directional lights 💀

but i think its not good.

[arctic isle]

I am not sure if an API exists for this (maybe look into the URP 2D render pipeline docs) but you can do this fairly easily with some basic geometry. For example, assuming your light is at the origin with a 0,0,0 rotation, you can find the points by shooting raycasts in the light's cone. You can optimize this by using a discrete offset for how many degrees you shoot rays at and then detect the objects you hit.

[gentle sluice]

that wont be accurate

shadow casters have shapePath

which are the points

[arctic isle]

I suppose it depends on how accurate you need it to be. You may be able to add a custom render pass to URP to extract these each frame, look up their docs.

[gentle sluice]

ok what im thinking is, render the vision cones with another camera, export them as texture, outline that texture, display it on main camera

do you think thats possible?

[bleak swift]

I'm trying to add a Global Light 2D using URP, however I can't even see it on the Light list when I try to add it to the hierarchy

I've got URP installed btw.

[gentle sluice]

youll need 2d packages

i think

[bleak swift]

Also when I remove it I get errors

[bleak swift]

Okay lemme check that out

Could be the issue

Nope

that is not the issue

Nevermind works now

I just had to add a URP Rendering Asset

and set the Graphics settings

[strong igloo]

Hi, so I'm trying to do some funky lightmap stuff, but it relies on me using a lightmap UV that I know. Currently I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change the lightmap UV to one I know, even just using normal baking methods figured it out

[plucky sun]

how to make the shadow color not affected by the sky lighting?

[deft fiber]

Disable ambient light from the sky in lighting environment settings

[plucky sun]

but want to keep the ambient light for objects

lol

[deft fiber]

All light sources are added up during the shader's lighting calculation, it doesn't know or care if something's in shadow before applying ambient lighting
It is masked by the ambient occlusion texture/factor, however

You could make a shader that masks ambient lighting by other lights, but I have a feeling that's not what you're really after

Baked lighting and probes can be used to occlude specific areas from ambient lighting, and in HDRP there's an indirect light controller volume override which can be used locally

[edgy oracle]

is it possible to have a 3d background with 3d lights in a 2d game

[deft fiber]

In built-in render pipeline yes, in scriptable render pipelines not very practically if you also want to use other 2D rendering features

[edgy oracle]

im using URP2D

i dont know much about render pipelines

[deft fiber]

Then not really
URP 2D disables almost every 3D feature

[edgy oracle]

ah alright

[vestal blaze]

Can someone explain to me why this happens with Probe Volumes? The spotlight is 0.5 units below the ceiling and pointing straight down, so there is no way any direct light should be reaching it. In realtime and mixed everything looks fine, but with baked lights some probes on the ceiling act as if they're in the cone of the spotlight which causes this bright spot.

[placid forum]

Hello I've a question about 2D Lighting using URP. Is it correct that every light on scene is separate draw call? Because thats what frmae debug tells me

[strong igloo]

@thorn halo bakery is just giving me a black texture

[woven badger]

any tips on how i can easily get rid of these light leaks?

would changing any light bake settings help with this?

[night shell]

build a light blocker

light blocker mesh

that'll do the trick

[woven badger]

ah alright

[formal veldt]

how do I make this object receive light from the lightmap?

[vestal blaze]

That looks move like UV overlap to me, I don't think trying to physically block the light will help if thats the case. You might want to select on of the GameObjects that's affected and open the lightmap that is shown in its Mesh Renderer to see where these bright spots are coming from, my guess is that they're bleeding in from an adjacent UV island in the lightmap that just happens to be brighter.

[night shell]

Lightprobes

[formal veldt]

don't you have to like draw a box over each room with those?

[night shell]

You can also place them by hand

[formal veldt]

how do you NOT place them by hand? I dont want to spend hours placing objects

[night shell]

there are tools you can get for free for placing probes in an array

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/simple-light-probe-placer-58290

[deft fiber]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8467097 at chapter 10 there's an explanation why those seams might occur and some suggestions to fix

[foggy condor]

anyone got an idea why am i getting these reflections on the cupboards?

[limber delta]

It looks like it's transparent Edit: I realized you might be talking about the colored light?

[foggy condor]

the colored light spots yeah

[deft fiber]

I think it's the same issue as described in the link I posted above

Basically color leaking from nearby areas on the lightmap

[foggy condor]

is there a way to find where is this coming from?

[deft fiber]

One way to diagnose the problem is to preview the lightmaps themselves to see if the UV regions are too close or overlapping

[foggy condor]

ahh alright thanks! and when i find where it is coming from? should i disable contribute to global illumination in the inspector?

...ooor?

[deft fiber]

There are many possible causes for lightmapping issues, which often are a sum of conflicting settings rather than "coming from" somewhere
If you can confirm why or how exactly the light leaks between lightmap UV regions then it'll be easier to find a solution

But I wouldn't disable the counter from global illumination, assuming you want it to have baked lighting even if that'd get rid of all baked lighting problems by virtue of not having it

[arctic isle]

Are you using a denoiser? Can you share a screenshot of your lighting settings?

At first glance this looks like hallucinated noise from the AI denoisers.

[fallen cedar]

I tried to bake lighting and it's the first picture but when I am pressing Play it is giving me this result (the second picture ) i guess it's the older lightmap

[foggy condor]

Now that I think of it could this be a cause of a high intensity reflection probe I have in the middle of the room?

[arctic isle]

that could also be the culprit

[timber lichen]

Would anybody be able to help me with this issue? I am using baked lightmapping in the Universal Render Pipeline, and I am having this issue that creates these "shadow lines" on my surface. I would like to get rid of them. Could anyone help?

[vestal blaze]

@timber lichen It's hard to tell what's going on from just the screenshot, could you share a sample project?

[timber lichen]

Essentially, I'm trying to use baked lightmapping to make my scene look better. The main light in my scene is my baked directional light, which I have placed on the right side of the screenshot, it is rotated down into the scene. The sunlight can be seen hitting the wall on the left side of the scene, in which there is a graphical issue of "shadow streaks" being created on the wall. Nothing is casting a shadow on it, I'm not sure why it's doing it.

[vestal blaze]

@timber lichen Did you enable "Generate lightmap UVs" on the model import settings of the wall?

[timber lichen]

yep

Oh!

I'm rebaking it

it worked! Thanks @vestal blaze !

[full nexus]

Is there any convenient way (besides layers and/or light layers) to prevent non shadow-casting real-time lights to light up areas behind walls etc?

We're doing procedural levels, which makes baking a no-go.. And we need to solve cases where wall lights etc dont light up geometry on the "wrong" side of walls

(using URP if that helps, or makes it worse)

[vestal blaze]

@full nexus I don't think there is any other way, that's what not having shadows means unfortunately. I feel your pain, I'm also in the process of planning a procedural game and there is just no good way to light those in Unity. GI is out of the question since there is neither support for baking at runtime nor storing baked data per-prefab instead of per-scene, using enlighten realtime GI to bake at run time is not an option either since that also requires precomputed data which only the editor can generate, and just using realtime direct lighting not only looks crap but also gets prohibitively expensive unless you disable shadows since you can't fall back to a shadowmask at a distance.

Have you seen this video about the lighting in Elder Scrolls Blades? https://youtu.be/KbxiGH6igBk
I think that's the only way to achieve good lighting with procedural levels, but that's far beyond most developers technically abilities to implement.

[full nexus]

@vestal blaze Yeah basically everything regarding the lighting settings stuff is off limits (out of the box) for procedural stuff, thats for sure.. Good info in the video, although if feels like a huge undertaking. Not really a viable solution for a small team.. Oh well, one can always dream.

[vestal blaze]

@full nexus Have you tried out the new adaptive probe volumes? They're HDRP only for now, but are supposed to come to URP at some later point too. With them you actually get per-pixel lighting which was not possible with traditional light probe groups, removing the need for lightmaps on static objects. The lighting is not going to be quite as good as it would be from lightmaps, but it sure as hell beats no GI at all. If the Unity devs ever got around to decoupling the baked probe data from the scene and allowed you to place and move and move probe volumes with prebaked data at runtime that could serve as a complete static and dynamic object lighting solution for procedural levels that doesn't require any hacks or technical wizardry. Support for baking data into prefabs instead of scenes has been on the GI roadmap for some time, and there seems to be a pretty serious commitment to these probe volumes so there may yet be some hope.

[full nexus]

Considering how "fast" the roadmap is moving. I'm not having my hopes turned up to much. Currently looking at Bakery which does baking per prefab (and is waaaaaay faster that Unitys solution). Again it has drawbacks. The main issue though. Is figuring out how to handle real-time lights in effects such as explosions. So they don't bleed over into adjacent rooms etc.

[vestal blaze]

I really wanted to check out Bakery too, but sadly it's only for nvidia GPUs. Does it also support baking probes per prefab or just lightmaps?

I think the only solution to the bleeding is to create some system using layers, like you said yourself already.

[full nexus]

It has a alternative based on a 3d texture with light data. But as I understand it, it required basing shaders on the ones Bakery supplies.

[ripe arch]

anyone know why this is happening (using URP)? Something with the shadows far away?

only happens beyond the last border in the shadow cascades

and only in deferred rendering

[deft fiber]

Some odd shadow problems in deferred rendering seem to be related to the "accurate g-buffer normals" setting

[ripe arch]

seems like it happens even if I disable that

[main wolf]

If you ignore the lightmap seam part, baking lightmap into prefab is actually straight forward, there are plenty of prefab lightmapper script/plugin out there.

[halcyon trench]

does anyone know how to change the intensity value of an HDR colour via script pls?

[halcyon trench]

figured it out

[thin mirage]

Why is lightning dark sometimes

So ded

[mellow sierra]

It's just isn't generating at runtime when you're switching scenes. If you make a build, it won't be like that.

[thin mirage]

wdym make a build?

[mellow sierra]

Export your game so you're not running it in the editor...?

[thin mirage]

Those screenshots are from my Android phone, already exported game

[deft fiber]

@thin mirage Editor generates ambient lighting when you open a scene, the build or play mode do not
So manually generate lighting for each scene from the lighting window, with auto-generate and baked lightmapping disabled (unless you intend to use baking)

[thin mirage]

alright ty

[ashen wing]

whats going on with my ceiling here? why doesnt the light reach it? the texture doesnt look like this. i slightly edited the image texture, the light wasnt like this before. i didnt change the position of the ceiling light

[little condor]

Does the material have a normal map? If so, check that the normal map texture is set to 'Normal map' in the texture properties. Or maybe its a reflection probe?

[ashen wing]

the normal map is how it should be, and i disabled all the probes to be sure and it wasnt that but the problem still persists. when i disable lighting entirely, the "shadow" goes away. i dont know whats wrong with it

it definitely is a lighting issue because when i move the light over there, its fine. but i dont think i have to explain why uh.. i dont want a light there

its jst weird that the light doesnt reach it, even though its directly next to it. the light hits the wall

[acoustic tide]

im struggling to figure out what's causing my shadows to act like this

[main wolf]

is the scene lighting enabled?

[vestal blaze]

@acoustic tide Try adjusting bias and normal bias on your spotlight and see if that makes a difference.

[acoustic tide]

seems to have helped, I set the bias and normal bias to 0

looks like the shadow resolution is changing but at least its not flickering like crazy

[ashen wing]

bruh why my baked lighting look like shit

[deft fiber]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/
There's many potential issues that could cause lightmap UV bleed or color artefacts

The obvious thing to check first is UV overlap debug view to verify that there are no overlap problems, and the lightmap asset view to make sure UV islands have decent padding between them and all fit in there properly

[ashen wing]

theres a few uv overlapping.. how do i fix it

[pastel elbow]

how can I get an area light to work?

No matter what I do area lights (Or any baked lighting for that matter) just doesn't show up in game

[little condor]

Have you set the lighting mode of your light to 'mixed' or 'baked', and set your gameobjects to static?

That should then bake properly.

[pastel elbow]

Light baking takes hella long

[night shell]

it does but there are ways to make it faster

and less painful during iterations

[night shell]

area lights are baked only @pastel elbow

there is no mixed or realtime mode

[little condor]

Or if you're using HDRP, there is a mixed and realtime mode.

[merry abyss]

What is the problem with this normal map thats causing it to light wrong?

this is the expected appearance from the correct side it looks right

but from the back it looks like heck

in 3dsmax it looks right

[deft fiber]

The normals on the texture don't look correct to me
How was it generated and what kind of shape is it meant to represent?

[swift gust]

how do i make the lens flare show up on the main camera?

[delicate flax]

Hello guys, would someone be willing to help me out to set up light for a VR HDRP scene? Currently I am struggling a bit, as all my settings lowers fps by 40, even on static baked lightning, so I am a bit stuck...

[near kettle]

Anyone know how to remove all 2d Lights in a project?

[ebon skiff]

Check the forward renderer or frame analyzer and see if SSAO is turned on - depending on the current settings it usually is by default and tends to drop fps pretty drastically. Otherwise we might need some more details

[ebon skiff]

go to window > rendering > light explorer and you can easily see and select all of your lights in the scene

[near kettle]

Thanks @ebon skiff ! I had to write a script that i could execute in edit mode to get rid of them. There were like 2000 calls to light 2d and its not even active

[ebon skiff]

Hey all, I need some advice on lighting for a PCVR project. I'm baking my lighting right now using Bakery and it looks great but I'm noticing that my dynamic objects are now only being lit using light probes. Unless there's something I'm missing, my metallic objects like guns seem to be lacking the specular highlights and are looking relatively flat. Also, I know I do want to use some realtime lights for flashlights, lighters, etc to cast light in dark areas. Is baked indirect with mixed lighting the way to go for this? I'm trying to save processing power and bake as much lighting as possible so any other suggestions than using the mixed lighting would be appreciated. My biggest problem right now is dynamic objects with the light probes looking a bit flat

[main wolf]

I dont know about bakery, but using unity's built in lightmapper, both dynamic and baked/static objects still can receive dynamic light (and shadow if using subtractive lightmap)

[pastel elbow]

what are some advantages and disadvantages of baked lighting? How have to spend the time to bake it in and that takes a while but what are some advantages?

[short isle]

What's an acceptable lightmap filesize for a large outdoors scene?
Mine is currently 26x2048x2048 @ 277MB
65M occupied texels
Several 1km x 1km terrains

[eternal heath]

I'm probably doing something really dumb but what might cause my Point Light attached to my star object here to not cast any light?
I tried a Directional Light, Spotlight, and Area Light and those all work fine but that's obviously not what I need here.

The planet here should be lit by the star to resemble day time but the entire thing isn't receiving any light

And yes the planet object is within range

[night shell]

I've run into this issue before

there are a couple of ways to restore those specular highlights on probe lit objects

a couple involve shader work, but the other is more simpler and perhaps what you might be more interested in doing

now this solution does require you to have reflection probes setup in your scene, but the idea is that for all of the baked lights that you have in your scene you basically spawn an "invisible to game but not to the reflection probes" emissive sphere, with matching intensity/color to your light source

when you bake those emissives get natrually baked in with the reflection probe and it will act like a specular highlight

it won't be a true "specular highlight" so to speak but its the closest you'll get

I wrote a script a while back that sort of automates this process for you

https://github.com/frostbone25/Unity-Specular-Probes

as long as your reflection probes are aligned up well and are in decent spots this should work fairly well

but look into that @ebon skiff that might help you

[night shell]

general advantages and disadvantages

1. (advantage) way higher quality than realtime lighting
   ||it simulates proper soft shadows, bounce lighting, color bleeding, all of the fancy lighting effects. it is also not prone to the same issues that realtime lights might have, for example shadows don't bleed through, you get no shadow acne, shadows don't disapear at a distance, and no pixelation aliasing of shadows (unless if your lightmaps are low resolution)||

2. (advantage) way more performant than realtime/mixed lighting
   ||all of the light is baked before hand into a texture, so that all that needs to be done at runtime to light the scene at the shader level is to simply load the texture and your done. No more steps beyond that is needed||

---

1. (disadvantage) memory costs
   ||since these large textures need to be stored and loaded, depending on how big the scene is size wise this can be a small or large problem. There are ways to mitigate this of course but you still have to deal with it||

2. (disadvantage) can take a long while to bake
   ||again depending on the complexity of your scene. There are ways to mitigate this of course and make it faster but chances are you'll still be waiting a while.||

3. (disadvantage) is completely static lighting
   || lighting that is baked in wont change. you can still have realtime lights but they won't appear as high quality the ones that are baked in the lightmap ||

4. (disadvantage) dynamic objects that are not baked won't inherit the same lighting
   ||now this can be solved by using light probes which allow dynamic objects to inherit the lighting from the lightmap, but they won't 100% perfectly match||

[pastel elbow]

That looks so nice 😭

[night shell]

all baked

[pastel elbow]

Thanks so I should probably use Baked lighting for general lighting of an area but use realtime for stuff like flashlights right?

[night shell]

yes

thats generally how most studios handle their lighting as well

[pastel elbow]

okiii

Annoying how you can't preview the lighting before baking it

[night shell]

yeah... but like I said there are ways to make it faster to bake so you can see results atleast more quickly than you are able to

[pastel elbow]

okay tysm!

anyways back to

-Golang

Which I am trying to learn

[eternal heath]

Anyone got any ideas?

[delicate mountain]

does anyone know if the path tracer in 2023 supports displacement?🥺

[little condor]

You have the lightmode set to Baked, so you need to bake the lighting. But you should set the mode to realtime if the planet will be moving.

[eternal heath]

It will be moving, also I'm on campus atm so I can't show but I tried realtime to begin with. :/

The other 3 light types seemed to work fine but obviously only in certain directions whereas I need a ball of light emitting in all directions

[serene mural]

I'm in URP and am having light problems. Does anyone know how to fix these flickering lights?

[deft fiber]

You can a video to embed when you use .mp4 or .webm
Also, look up "pixel light limits"

[serene sorrel]

Does anyone know why this light might be casting shadows only from certain directions? I'm using URP and the sprite material is sprite-basic-lit

[delicate mountain]

shadow quality/settings in the project settings perhaps?

[serene sorrel]

I tried that and couldnt really find much besides "shadowmask"

I didn’t notice there’s a specific channel for URP, would it be better to ask in there?

[static falcon]

Why my scene looks weird after baking lightmap

[whole granite]

Specular highlights aren’t included in baked lightmap data, if you want spec highlights with baked gi your either gonna need to use a reflection probe or mixed lighting

[static falcon]

Its not the only problem

Walls look weird

[whole granite]

You have filtering set to none in your lightmap settings

Set it to auto

[static falcon]

Ok thanks

[static falcon]

Scene already contains a reflection probe but realtime, if i set it to baked, does it fix

[whole granite]

Not entirely

One sec

https://github.com/zulubo/SpecularProbes

[deft fiber]

Check for lightmap UV overlap and lightmap UV seam related problems
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/

[delicate mountain]

amazing find what, thanks!

[ebon skiff]

@night shell Thanks much for the input, I appreciate it! I'll look into it a bit more when I sit down tonight and get back into it but I should already have reflection probes set up in my scene and ready to go. My alternative was going to be looking at ways to manually project shadows for the player from the nearest light source or interpolate nearby sources. For the flashlights and muzzle flashes I didn't know if it was possible to add a pass for additive vertex lighting from select sources with a custom shader which would take me a while to figure out haha

[night shell]

yep

[cobalt tangle]

I dont know if this belongs in this channel but my sprite is displaying weirdly. When I made it it looks like this

in unity it looks like this ^

[night shell]

if you need some ideas or input I can get into the custom shader route where you could try to preserve those baked specular highlights when baking lighting both on lightmaps/dynamic objects

but its up to you

[ebon skiff]

I would love any info you could offer! I'm currently using bakery for the lightmaps with monoSH that preserves a lot of the specular effects on the statics and looks great but it seems to be forcing the use of light probes for the dynamics too. Ideally I'd like to keep the baked lighting but still use realtime on only the dynamic objects but I've got a lot of iterating and profiling to do I'm sure to find some kind of happy medium but I'm always open to hearing how someone else would tackle it, especially since I'm pretty new to how custom shaders and renderers work

[main wolf]

for the missing specular, you'll most likely need a custom shader that can utilise the directional lightmap
for the weird wall, seems like you need to generate lightmap uv in the 3d model importer, either that or adding padding and/or increasing lightmap scale for the wall

it's weird though that in 5.X, there is a lightmap mode called directional specular, where lightmap with specular works out of the box, which is not available anymore in the 20XX version
https://docs.unity3d.com/550/Documentation/Manual/LightmappingDirectional.html
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LightmappingDirectional.html

[night shell]

I've mentioned it earlier but you can also preserve it by using reflection probes and emissive spheres that emulate the lights to retain that specular detail

[night shell]

https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/filamented/-/issues/4

I made a post to a shader dev for their improved "standard" shader for this, but in that post I basically detail how you could retain that specular highlight on SPECIFICALLY probe lit objects

[main wolf]

I personally trying to avoid light probes

[night shell]

why?

[main wolf]

too much a hassle, need to place it carefully by hand, if there's a change on level, need to edit them as well, not working on procedural level/map, etc...

[night shell]

for the first point by placing them, there are tools to automate it for you and make it painless. If level geometry changes it also means you need to edit them as well yes but again there are tools to automate the placement of probes to make them painless. As for the third point for procedual stuff yes I can understand. In a procedual setting you'd be sticking with realtime lighting only honestly

[main wolf]

I'd rather sample lighting information directly from lightmaps 😎

[night shell]

well good luck with objects that don't sample from the lightmap then 😛

[ebon skiff]

This is absolutely what I was looking for, thank you!!! I'll have to do some more research to make sure I'm understanding how to put that into a shader before I just copy and paste lol. I was planning on using the better lit shaders asset from Jason Booth as it has a lot of features I could take advantage of, do you think this would integrate with that? I know he has another asset for modifying shaders modually with just the passes you need and though I'm not sure how it works it looked interesting to me as far as helping with the workflow for people working on the project that aren't as code knowledgeable

[night shell]

the difficulty depends on how their shaders are structured/written but in theory yeah. Unless if he has support for it, but honestly I haven't seen too many shaders that support what I described for probe only objects

[main wolf]

In a procedual setting you'd be sticking with realtime lighting only honestly
Certainly not an option for mobile games with a lots of lighting.
But still, there's not enough reason for me to use light probes so far

[night shell]

well in that context, a procedual + mobile setting I can understand that. But avoiding them outside of that setting seems a bit dumb

[main wolf]

why are you so eager in getting me into using light probe anyway? 🤔

[night shell]

because light probes are so cool 😛

but also the sole purpose of light probes are to allow dynamic non-baked objects to blend well with lightmapped static geometry

and like lightmapping, performance wise is also faster than having realtime lights

but oh well, its just a tool after all

not like it works for every circumstance

[main wolf]

agree 😁
in the end, players wont even care/notice which path you/we use 😛

[night shell]

unless your digital foundry

[ebon skiff]

To be honest I don't believe I've seen any public shaders supporting this and I've done a looooot of research to see if there's any readily available solutions. I'd put this on the asset store if you can! I'll have to look into it more but I believe he had something that could modify shaders in a more artist friendly way so that something like your code to render using the reflection probes can be added as a 'shader chunk' or whatever you might call it and be incorporated into another shader variant. I'll have to look into that more but your solution seems pretty spot on to what I imagined the light probes would do by default to keep metallic materials intact

[edgy aurora]

Alright, so I have this weird issue where I can't change the intensity of my lights through code. My goal is to have them fade over time using something like this.cLight.intensity -= Time.deltaTime;. Setting it to a static value like this.cLight.intensity = 0 does not appear to do anything either.

[edgy aurora]

Is there a thing where you can't change the intensity of lights on prefabs or something? It seems I can't even change it in the inspector at runtime

[night shell]

no errors in console?

[edgy aurora]

nope, I'm only unable to change it.

[edgy oracle]

is there a way to hide objects in shadows like in among us?

[night shell]

yes

[edgy oracle]

how would i do that

i cant find anything online about it

well i did but nothing worked

[deft fiber]

It usually requires a stencil pass or some other type of masking, but how to do it exactly varies by render pipeline

[cedar quest]

is it possible to force an object to recieve illumination (so it gets light-baked) but not contribute to any shadows or bouncelights for the other objects (or itself really)?

I've gotten direct shadows turned off on a specific object but I'm having a harder time figuring out how to turn off bouncelight contribution from it

[deft fiber]

Why exactly and/or what kind of object it is? A bit hard for me to visualize

[cedar quest]

I'll try to rephrase it a bit. I want an object to get a baked lightmap texture applied to it as if other objects are casting shadows and lights are illuminating etc. But it shouldn't contribute to the light on any other objects. I'm starting to think it might not be possible in one straight bake but I might have to do it in two passes (once with the object active and then once again with it disabled)

turning off bouncelights and purely using the direct lighting and turning off the objects ability to cast shadows is kinda what I'm after (but I would also like to have bouncelights and all that)

[deft fiber]

It doesn't sound possible without hacky workarounds
From what I know of the light baking, it's the ray terminating on a surface that determines light or shadow, and only in that case can the lightmap receive data i.e. there are no "piercing" light rays
Still, what's it for? Sounds rather unusual

Maybe there's another option besides baking for it

[cedar quest]

I want to bake the lighting to a plane where my gameplay happens so that I can sample from this planes lightmap texture for my dynamic gameplay objects

I was thinking the same thing as you that the ray must eliminate.., but then that doesn't seem to be true for direct shadows since they can both contribute to my object while piercing through it when casting shadows are disabled

but I'm willing to accept that it's a special case and that I have no control over the secondary or following bouncerays

it's pretty similar to the technique used here
https://youtu.be/SYzNZ-eoiFE

[deft fiber]

Afaik only mixed lighting allows that, which uses realtime lighting for direct shadows

[cedar quest]

I'm not sure what you're talking about.., I just tested baking lightmap with only directional lights (no bounces) and turning off shadow casting on an object does behave like I described. It's more or less exactly the behaviour I want if I didn't care about bouncelights 🙂

and it's not realtime shadows in that case but rather in the baked texture itself

anyways.., I'll probably keep to doing two bake-passes. One with the plane and all the other objects and then one for the scene without the plane in it

[deft fiber]

Ah, you're right I didn't know baked lightmapping did respect the Cast Shadow setting

[deft fiber]

Out of curiosity what for you sample the lightmap texture? For gameplay or lighting reasons perhaps

[cedar quest]

oh it's for lighting reasons. Since my gameplay is more or less locked to that one plane I can get some really nice "realtime" shadows that way

the idea is very similar to the video I posted above

so the idea is:

• bake out lightmap on a plane to a separate texture
• add texture sampler in the shader and make sure the uvs match the planes world position so it matches 1 to 1

[deft fiber]

That sounds pretty cool!

[cedar quest]

That's what we thought as well. So figured it could be worth testing out 🙂

[deft fiber]

I wish I could be of more help, hope someone more knowledgeable stops by
I'll gladly hear how it goes ^^

[wind grail]

Does someone know how to do a custom halo of a light?

like this

[wind grail]

Solved

[cedar quest]

where's the halo? I don't see any lens effects at all on display here? 😕

[wind grail]

I confused with another thing

[cedar quest]

ah

[wind grail]

this

not a halo sry

the effect of the projector

@cedar quest help

[cedar quest]

aah right. Yeah the cheapest way I can think of is some kind of mesh that always stays aligned with the camera.., almost like a billboard effect

but it depends.., some other simple ways to do this is just to have a mesh that follows this shape. But then you have problems with how to make it fuzzy at the edges and what happens if you go inside it

can you elaborate your circumstances?

[wind grail]

What are circumstances

i'm not good at english

[cedar quest]

basically what you need it for. What will be the end result

[wind grail]

Projector

like in the photo

[cedar quest]

ok. Will you control the game (I'm assuming you're making a game) exactly like in the game your picture is from? (first person camera, wasd movement etc)

[wind grail]

(yes i'm making a game, i created the other one but i lost the project)

[wind grail]

what do you mean for exactly like in the game your picture is from?

i control it yea with wasd ( or controller), and it's first cam,

if i look at it it's like this

[cedar quest]

I think I've seen at least one other asset you could use to get something like this running. Do you want to make it from scratch yourself or just use something premade?

bummer about losing the project

[wind grail]

well, my designer can do it

game designer

i'm the scripter and builder, running and other things i have it

[cedar quest]

ok. I can imagine doing some kind of shader on a custom mesh where it's always aligning towards the camera. A little bit trickier to do it with a projected rectangle rather than a circle (the math would be easier) but it wouldn't be unimaginably hard to accomplish. What would probably make it trickier is if you also need the effect to have an animation in it (like as if it was actually projecting a video). In that case I imagine doing real raycasting might be the best solution but it would probably be a bit expensive

but maybe it's enough to have it just multiply with the median color of each frame of the animation

here's an example by using the line component in unity. It's not going to cut it for what you need but the idea is pretty close

[wind grail]

Tysm, solved i did it like the original, it was a texture of a lighting point direction

[lunar horizon]

Does anyone know how to stop light bleed on a generated mesh? Here's an example of it:

[upper fable]

Double sided shadow casting could help. This problem has nothing to do with generated mesh, that happens because of the hard edge splits

[fierce lynx]

are reflection probes meant to be showing all non-static objects too?

[night shell]

depends if the reflection probe itself is baked or realtime

[vague dove]

I am trying to make the character look like it does in Eeevee or Cycles in Unity but it just looks different and I tried a few things (even emulating SSS) but it just looks bad.

So far I've got it to look a bit better but it still does not look like how I have it in Blender.

The skin looks more pink-ish in Unity even though it's the same texture, hair looks darker and same for the jacket. Adding directional lights only adds more reflection to the character which I don't want. Somehow I need to fix the colours so that they show as I want them to.

[night shell]

its worth mentioning that by default unity does not have alot of things built in to the pipeline that eevee has on by default

@vague dove

no tonemapping, ao, SSR, area lights, etc.

so I would ask first, how do you have your scene/materials setup and lit in eevee

because if its not lit and/or setup same of course its going to look different

[vague dove]

These are the settings i use in Eevee for the skin material, with the skin texture coming from my texture atlas for the character.

For the lighting I am using the following:

key light (area light) in the front
fill light (on the sight)
rim light (in the back top of the model)

I also have a fourth light source which is standing away from the character, it is a sun with a pink-ish tint, these are the settings

And this is how it looks like in Rendered view with Eevee

@night shell

[night shell]

and how is your unity scene setup

I'll sorta spoil what I'm leading towards but its important to recongize that the ways in which blender (yes even eevee) renders things, is different from how unity (which has true realtime rendering) renders things

[vague dove]

A skybox, a directional light and that's about it

[night shell]

the way lights behave, what features that are included by the renderer by default

etc.

for one also it doesn't look the same also becuase you don't light it the same

your only lighting currently with 1 directional light, and with the unity skybox ambient lighting

compared to your blender render, your rendering with 3 different lights

your key being an area light (which in unity is not supported in realtime, so your closest equivlant is a spotlight ||for built in rendering pipeline anyway||), you don't detail what light types exactly you are using in blender for your rim and fill lights but i'm going to assume that they were something close to spot lights

[vague dove]

I am using area light for the key and rim lights and I am using a point light for the fill light @night shell

Also one thing that really bothers me, in Eevee the character looks crisp and the details of the geometry can be clearly seen across the entire character

in Unity there is a big lack of detail, giving it a blurry sort of feel instead of a crisp result

[night shell]

because of the lighting

its not the same or lit simiarlly

lets start a seperate thread

because this sounds like it'll be a long discussion

[vague dove]

Sure thing, I really need to solve this because right now it is a serious issue

[strange fog]

when removing shadows in my mesh renderer it doesnt work

[exotic tulip]

i think is not possible, but it works in android 3-4 players with a flashlight?

[deft fiber]

What doesn't work?

Not casting shadows doesn't imply that geometry facing away from light won't be shaded

[little mason]

anyoen able to try to help me fix this issue?

see the hard squares that the red light makes

[odd temple]

Hi. How to add more lights in URP unity?

[jaunty briar]

Are you using a forward renderer? Try setting the red light's 'Render Mode' to important. You might be hitting a real-time light limit (per object)

[strange fog]

Well I’m aiming for it not to have shadows. And if I rotate it or move it away from light there isn’t any shadows so something isn’t working

[deft fiber]

Do you mean no shadow casting onto what's behind it, or not having a shadowy side at all?

[strange fog]

Not having a shadowy side at all

[deft fiber]

For that there's the unlit shader

Fundamentally the lit shader assumes that an object will start fully dark + light illuminating surfaces facing light sources + ambient light + reflections
So there really isn't light without shadow, unless the surface is also emissive or lit by strong ambient light

[flint pivot]

So this might be a bit hard to explain, but I used a normal map to make it so this grid only appears when a light is put on it. I want it to look like the second image from all angles, but half the time it looks like the first. Is there something else I can do, should I not use normal maps?

[little mason]

thank you so much this fixed the issue! im super new to lighting stuff so thanks for all the help

[jaunty briar]

No worries!

[amber dust]

hi guys, i'm hoping to use unity to import a DXF file, cast a light on it, and export the shadow it produces against the wall behind it to a file. is this out of the realm of unity's power? it feels like this is something unity can do to me, as a newb

[sharp glen]

Why when I change scenes in game (if it has a different skybox) does it looks so dark

After

Before

ah

Auto generate lighting

cool

[worthy forum]

asd

nobody does anyway nevermind

[civic viper]

when I increase the shadow distance, my shadows start to look like shit, I can increase the cascades to make it look better but haven't found anything else in the max quality preset

[upper fable]

You can also change the shadow map resolution

[civic viper]

as high as I want? (aware that its gonna cost performance)

[weak junco]

Hello, I have a problem with my cave lightning. The area in the back gets dark only when I move closer to it. So when a player enters the cave, it looks like there´s a light at the end. But when he gets closer, it´s just a dark wall.

Do you know how to fix this? It looks like the shader´s drawing only in some area around the camera, but I don´t know what to do with it.

[main wolf]

Some options I can think of:
-increase shadow distance
-hide using fog
-bake lighting

[timid mulch]

hi guys, hope you are having a good day. I've run into a problem and i cant seem to find a fix. I'm generating terrain using mapbox in GoMaps, Im also trying to add lights near roads but road textures seem to glitch in some places especially when i move my camera , it can be fixed if i change the road material from (opaque to Transparent) ..but then i get a strange light glitch ..any help would be appreciated:)

material flickering and light glitch

[weak junco]

Increasing the Shadow Distance worked. Thank you very much !

[bitter tangle]

If I have substractive light mode

[indigo iron]

I am using HDRP, how can i have a scene with a lot of lights that can be switched on and off AND isnt running at 10fps? If I bake the lighting, the scene is still lit.

[arctic isle]

Have you tried baking Realtime GI + Light Probes?

[indigo iron]

I havent looked much into GI cus i thought it wouldnt work for a large indoor scene, but ill give it a try now that youre mentioning it

thanks

[bitter tangle]

If i have a mixed light and a static surface, bake the light, should the mixed light not be baked into the static surface and not lit up new static areas when I move it If I have substractive light mode?

[deft fiber]

Correct
Looks like the floor might not be GI static

[tame walrus]

so are light flares just a way to make a custom halo? right now they sorta just appear as a cube that fades in and out regardless of image transparency, but im mainly concerned about the low quality look to them

they dont seem to appear at all through transparent objects in my scene either

[gloomy ember]

why is it that when i copy and paste the exact same lighting and sprite into another scene, the lighting looks darker?

image 1: scene 1
image 2: scene 2 with the darker lighting

[bitter tangle]

Sorry, should have showed the floor too. Seems static to me, I also tried to clear and bake the lightmap just now in case I had forgotten but nope, still behaves as a dynamic light. Ì uploaded the simple example project here if someone want to take a look and call me an idiot for missing that thing that is totally obvious to everyone but me https://github.com/endasil/mixed-light-issue 😉

[deft fiber]

Trying out 2019.4. it seems for whatever reason Subtractive mode works more like Baked Indirect

So, indirect light from the mixed light is lightmapped but direct isn't

[bitter tangle]

Reading the description here, it seems to me like the direct light should be lightmapped too?

[deft fiber]

That's what it claims and that's how it works in modern Unity versions in my experience

[bitter tangle]

Perhaps it's a bug with 2019.4? Did you use the latest .4 version?

[deft fiber]

2019.4.31f1 is not the latest but it's the "vrchat version" so I assumed you're stuck to it

[bitter tangle]

Yeah, i was wondering if it was fixed in more recent versions or if I should send a bug report to Unity and see if they fix it, in case VR chat at some time get the idea of updating to a more recent version of 2019.

[deft fiber]

You can do tests and reports if you wish but vrchat haven't updated their unity version for almost two years and counting

[idle portal]

Hello guys, im using URP and my 2D scene isnt completly dark? How can i fix it?

[modern mauve]

How do i make it so there is a fog effect like a supper weak smoke effect that makes it hard to see far away. and the smoke/cloud is barely visible only while shining light on it it would reflect that light and the smoke would be more visible

[deft fiber]

You may be thinking volumetric fog

[modern mauve]

Do you know how beatsaber lobby looks like?

thats the fog

ill get an image

bad image ama get a better one

It makes everything in distance fade away basicly @deft fiber

[deft fiber]

Could be simple distance fog, possibly with fog particles for variety

Distance fog doesn't interact with lights, but fog/smoke particles don't interact with geometry very well
If you need both you'll need volumetrics
But most of the time it's better to fake things than to accurately simulate them
Light beams can also be faked with sprites or shaders to make it seem like they interact with the fog even if they really don't

[idle portal]

Does anyone know why this happens? The block below should be textured instead of white. When i put the material as Unlit it will look textured and i can see the colors clearly. Why doesnt it work when the Material is lit? Im using URP btw.

[deft fiber]

Please don't crosspost
These channels are for questions and topics of discussion

[idle portal]

Can you maybe answer my question? Sorry for asking you but if i dont ask i will not get an answer.

[deft fiber]

I've used URP 2D very little and I don't recall a similar issue so I don't have any good ideas to try

[idle portal]

Ah ok, sadly there is not much information online about URP 2D

[deft fiber]

It's a bit lackluster in that sense
If you can find some official examples or demo projects they could prove invaluable for troubleshooting

[idle portal]

Well it works with the normal unity template

I really do not know why its like that

[deft fiber]

That's good news as it means you can compare to find the problem
Sometimes I end up passing almost every gameobject from one scene or project to another trying to hunt down the one thing that's breaking it

[somber coral]

I accidentally messed up my lighting when changing unity graphics versions.

Now all my directional lights cause a weird coloration

everything is green

[somber coral]

turns out this was fixed by rotating the directional light, causing it to rebake and remove the weird coloration

[deft fiber]

You can usually solve these by clearing the light cache and clicking generate manually
Auto-generate is more prone to problems than manual

[somber coral]

how do you clear light cache?

[somber coral]

found it. thanks

[idle portal]

Since the project isnt that big right now, i think im gonna copy all scripts and gameobjects over

[soft tree]

I have multiple scenes with baked lighting but now i want to merge them and put all prefabs in one scene, is there any way to switch baked lighting data as i toggle active/inactive per prefab.

[whole bramble]

hey folks

the lod objects are having black stains when lightmapping

i've checked "generate lightmap UV on import settings

when im baking that object without LOD

its fine

but when its on LOD level 2 or 3 or something

it has dark artifacts on it

[chilly kettle]

Does the LOD Object all have a lightmap attached?

[whole bramble]

yeah...

[deft fiber]

"dark artifacts" sounds like texel invalidity, so most likely the lod models have exposed backfaces

[whole bramble]

in that case what should i do?

backface tolerance to 0?

[deft fiber]

Best solution is to not have exposed backfaces in meshes
Two-sided rendering and backface tolerance can also work but may not be so performant or reliable

[whole bramble]

what i did is just put light probes on those

no interest on painstaking

[deft fiber]

Light probes shouldn't have any impact on texel invalidity, so it may have been a different issue
Pictures always help

[vapid sedge]

why does my light change depending on where i look?

[deft fiber]

Could be an issue with automatic exposure
Check if your active volume defines some and if so, see if using fixed type removes the issue

[sly marten]

anyone have any suggestions on how to light a large space scene? A point light for the sun is probably not going to work as the distances involved are very large. A directional light is not going to work as the sun is in the middle of the scene. Currently using URP

[civic viper]

you need to increase the radius of the point light

[sly marten]

yeah I've tried that but at large distances you get a lot of flickering and the shadows look like garbage

[civic viper]

this might be a problem of floating point imprecision, what kind of distances are we talking about from world space center?

[sly marten]

thousands, millions - definitely a floating point precision thing. I've already solved other issues that come along with that (floating origin / multiple cameras for far / near objects etc) so I'm looking for tricks that could help with lightning this scenario. Couple things I've thought of

• directional light that points from sun to wherever camera is looking ? not sure if this would look right at all
• a spot light for each celestial body that originates at the sun - might get messy especially with a lot of bodies

maybe having things that are far away be scaled way down and rendered with a separate camera and point light - need to handle transition between layers in that case

[civic viper]

does the flickering ocour on an object that is only a few meters from the origin away?

[civic viper]

or other question does the flickering ocour only when far away from the point light?

or also when close

[idle portal]

Ah now i know, i had volumetric lights on, still really weird behaviour

[sly marten]

the flickering seems to be only when i move the camera and happens wherever I am so that could be a separate issue - doesn't happen with directional lights though. Big issue with point lights is in order for them to reach far enough the intensity has to be so high that anything nearing the sun gets completely white and washed out

[deft fiber]

The light components (or unity scenes in general) are not designed to work on a cosmic scale

Games that accurately simulate space don't do so using real world units
They usually have some type of floating origin system that effectively repositions and resizes the world when going from solar system scale to planetary scale

Light shading and shadow casting would need to be specialized for this purpose as well

[sly marten]

yeah for sure - looking for techniques or somewhere to start looking in how to implement that

[deft fiber]

If you don't want to invest effort in all that, I recommend to try to make a miniaturized solar system no bigger than 5000 units in each direction

If you don't need seamless transition from galactic travel to human eye level on a planet, it could still be sufficient for many use cases

[sly marten]

from research it seems like a custom shader to modify point light attenuation might solve the intensity issue for small and large distances

[winged tangle]

hey guys, im very confused as to the purpose of baked lighting