archived-lighting

[winged tangle]

so if I have a realtime time, there is only direct lighting from the light source to the objects.
I can only get indirect lighting if I bake the lighting, right?
but shouldnt baked lighting also capture direct lighting as well? why is it that when I move my lightsource after baking, the light still affects the brightness of the objects?

[upper fable]

Maybe you use mixed lighting?

[winged tangle]

yes

ok i see, fixed 🙂

but now it's no longer shiny..

i dont get reflections?

[night shell]

1. realtime only affects direct lighting on objects, so your correct
2. you are also correct in that you can only get indirect/bounced lighting if you bake lighting (however if you are lucky, depending on what render pipeline you are using unity has a system called "Enlighten" which allows you to get realtime indirect bounce lighting. though not as high quality as pure baking)
3. bake lighting does infact capture direct lighting as well (depending on how you have it setup, for instance if all of your lights are set to "Baked" then it will do direct lighting, but if its set to realtime it won't be included, but if its set to mixed then it will only compute the bounced lighting from that light source, and the direct lighting will be handled by the realtime light)
4. you've run into a core problem of lightmaps in that making any changes to baked lights, the results will stay the exact same unless you REBAKE the lighting again. inherently with baked lighting its all about basically computing the lighting and saving it to a texture to save on a ton of performance. If your lighting is going to stay the same in your game/level, why bother recalculating the light every frame with realtime when you can save on performance and bake it into a texture with higher quality results 😛

[night shell]

this is also another problem with the current built in stuff that unity has when it comes to purely baking your lighting. is that you will lose out on some of that specular highlights and shine that you get easily with realtime lighting. There are ways to bring it back of course even if your lights are fully baked

tldr; baked lighting is all about saving performance, and usually is much higher quality than realtime lighting, but it does not change unless you rebake

[winged tangle]

thank you for your indepth answer! it cleared up a lot of my misconceptions 🙂

would you be able to tell me how I can get back my specular highlights while also using fully baked lighting? right now I have it set to mixed: indirect baked + realtime for the specular.

i've been trying for a week to get my Unity scene to match my Blender Cycles version, but it's so difficult. Blender just looks so good out of the box, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong in Unity

[night shell]

well I can tell you right off the bat the way in which both blender and unity render is VERY different

espeically with blender cycles, cycles it a proper physically based raytracerd renderer its very easy to make things look good because it models how light actually works IRL

but its WAY too slow for games, so unity and namely other game engines employ a "realtime renderer" that is essentially to put it plainly, just a bunch of hacks and tricks to emulate how say "blender cycles" works but it does it in a SUPER fast way... the problem with that is inherently with what I said regarding it being a bunch of hacks and tricks so it doesn't behave and do things how you'd expect

you get me? @winged tangle

as for getting back those specular highlights I'll let you know in a bit, in the middle of something but i'll get back to you

[winged tangle]

i understand. I kind of meant it in the way of unity's baked lighting though. like unity's baked lighting also doesnt seem as good as Blender's

I've tried both Unity Lightmapper and Bakery addon, both just fall short of Blender Cycles. I'm sure there must be something I am missing because Unity is able to pull off those incredible realtime HDRP demos

[night shell]

would be easier to see if we had visuals on what your getting, and what your trying to match

because there is a plethora of reasons why what your getting may not be matching the level of quality you'd expect

so seeing what results your getting, and what your trying to match would help narrow things down

[winged tangle]

ok, ill set it up real quick 🙂

[winged tangle]

i think Unity might have messed up my UVs after I tried using auto-lightmap uv generation:
but there is Cycles vs Unity HDRP baked

cycles looks a lot smoother

[night shell]

you have a pretty large point light in the cycles scene contributing to very soft shadows, and in the unity scene you have harsh shadows for the point light

there is an option to get soft shadows in the unity bake

[winged tangle]

ok i will look for that now

[night shell]

should be a field in the unity baked light settings for setting the shadow angle

or if it isn't there, probably a field for where you can set the size of the point light radius for shadow softness

[deft fiber]

A lot of lighting is dependent on view direction, that's something you can't represent with baking which is why specularity is difficult at best
Unlike ray-tracing, baking is also limited by the resolution of asset you bake the lighting to

Despite that I'm used to seeing better shadows when baking than ones in your example

[winged tangle]

maybe it's my UV lightmaps messed up. i had good uv unwraps, then checked auto lightmaps to compare. maybe it overwrote the lightmaps. im gonna try URP and see if i can get a soft shadow

[deft fiber]

Baking is the same across render pipelines
URP has only somewhat better realtime shadow filtering than BiRP
You'll need HDRP to get true light diameter and shadow filtering

The only significant error I see in the picture are the wobbly soft shadows

Assuming they're baked in there probably isn't enough samples

[winged tangle]

hmm :9

i dont think i can find the soft shadow radius

in HDRP at least

[deft fiber]

iirc it's "diameter" for punctual lights and "size" for directional lights
"radius" for punctual lights, "angular diameter" for directional and "size" for area lights

[winged tangle]

ohh ok

i didnt see that! i was messing with the point light range thinking it was same as radius

thank you

[deft fiber]

Range is just for limiting how far it can reach
Not a physically accurate variable but important for performance or artistic reasons

The progressive lightmapper respects HDRP light source size variables when baking, but since other render pipelines don't have that I'm not sure how that can be controlled

[tame walrus]

how do i add 2 light flares to a light

[marble compass]

Hello, I am having a spot of trouble with using BakeryGPU, I have over 100 Point Lights and I am not sure if I should bake without the scripts attached to the light or should I bake without the scripts at all.

[winged tangle]

You need to attach the Bakery Point Light script to the Unity Point Light. Alternatively, you can also just add in a Bakery Point Light object from the Bakery menu

But the Bakery Point Light added from the Bakery Menu does not have a realtime light preview or anything like that. So it's kind of guess and check if you do it that way

[whole bramble]

i fell into problem

after baking

before baking

does anyone know about the issue?

im using legacy diffuse shader

[deft fiber]

Can you describe the specific problem

[whole bramble]

why does the light go that much dark?

after the bake

[deft fiber]

If your light bulb is GI static and casts shadows and the light source is inside of it, no light can escape

Light source could be inside the lampshade as well

[whole bramble]

cast shadows off on the bulb

but yeah , GI static

turned it off...lets see the result

still doesnt work

[deft fiber]

If you move the light to the middle of the room away from all geometry, then bake, do you see any improvement

[whole bramble]

yes

it bakes correctly

[deft fiber]

Then it confirms you are solving the correct issue which is good ^^

[whole bramble]

this time

i took the light middle of the room ...and outside the bulb

lets see if it works or not

[deft fiber]

Not just overlapping but geometry extremely close to lights can be problematic for the baker
That's why in that situation I would instead use a spot light just a shy distance below the light fixture, and a GI static emissive material for the light bulb for illuminating the shade

[whole bramble]

in the picture

all mesh are combined

into a single mesh

huff..thanks a lot

its working correctly now

actually you are right

light should be kept far from geometry

[proud wyvern]

why is my shadow so pixelated?

[deft fiber]

Large spot angle, large distance from the light source and small relative size of shadow casting object

Large spot angle is generally the hardest thing for shadow casting

[still bobcat]

I'm having and issue where only half of my terrain is being lit up? I'm using the same three textures throughout my terrain. Weird thing is its only the ground not lighting up. All the props are effected by light but only half the ground? using URP any one have any idea?

[deft fiber]

Looks like pixel light limits per object

[proud wyvern]

but what is the best way to make a room bright?

[deft fiber]

There's no best way, as it depends on the scene and what tools you can use
A point light fares better than a spot light specifically for shadow casting in this particular case

[still bobcat]

How would i increase that? and thanks for helping us both at the same time lol

[deft fiber]

You can increase it in quality settings but only up to 8
It's a complex issue
In forward rendering path each mesh is rendered again for each light, which is why there's a limit
Games usually deal with this by partitioning meshes into smaller slices and avoiding bundled up lights, but it's not easy to do for a Terrain asset
Baked/mixed lights work fine to solve it, but it's a whole workflow with specific costs and limitations
Deferred rendering path is an option, but that also comes with costs and limitations
Newest versions of URP have forward+ rendering path that solves the problem with effectively no drawbacks by slicing the screen into tiles instead, but it may be undercooked yet

[still bobcat]

ah alright thank you!

[neat sparrow]

Why does my scene look fine from the scene view, but horrible when put through a camera and then a render texture?

Too much color banding.

It looks fine from the game view too, actually. The camera previews look fine.

Well, I found a solution embarrassingly quickly after asking, I changed the color format to 16 bits and now it looks fine.

It is weird, though. I thought monitors only display 8 bits so I don't get why putting it to 16 bits would make it better.

[quartz jetty]

Hey im trying to use bakery and its just stuck in preparing for a long time and doesnt change
https://gyazo.com/858e1c051df469f7e5ac5b0d79d3eed7

[unkempt warren]

https://gyazo.com/ac381531937703e7426b23e917aee56c
anyone knows what could've caused this?

[unique vortex]

Hey does anyone knows of to fix this kind of issue (the non light square boxes)
:

[deft fiber]

Check if you have too many lights affecting the mesh at once
URP's default limit is 4

[unkempt warren]

Is there a way to check that that doesnt involve manually going to each light and seeing if it shines on the Mesh?

[deft fiber]

You could multi-select the lights and the mesh in hierarchy to have the mesh and light ranges visualized together to see how close they get

[unkempt warren]

muchas gracais

[deft fiber]

You can also reduce or add the number of light sources in that area to see if the problem gets better or worse, to confirm that it's a light limit problem
If it is, refer to these notes about how to solve it
<#archived-lighting message>

[winged tangle]

@deft fiber @night shell thank you both!
I finally got unity to look almost like blender cycles 🙂
unfortunately i had to fake it by using one baked light for GI, and a cloned light but in realtime for the specularity. looks good tho!

[unkempt warren]

how do I increase the max amount to 8? I confirmed that that's the issue but I only have 7 lights in my scene anyways

either I'm blind or I don't know what it's called

also dont see anything in the render pipeline

[unkempt warren]

oh yep thanks

ouch there goes my aesthetic

seemed to increase the brightness if everything

[deft fiber]

Aesthetic? The only change should be that now more lights can affect a surface

[unkempt warren]

Everything is "dark" but changing it seemed to almost triple everything's intensity

just did /3 and it looks the same again

[deft fiber]

Can you show a picture of how it changed?

[unkempt warren]

well this is what it looked like before

and then this was after

[deft fiber]

Mixing baked and realtime lights is perfectly fine, and the light type "mixed" lets you do that according to specific shadowmasking rules so you don't get diffuse lighting rendered multiple times

[deft fiber]

I've ever seen light limit only add or remove existing lights, so something weird is up unless you have some very strong lights that have been culled up until now

[swift shore]

Hey guys, for my school project within unity. My walls appear like this They are planes with two sided shadows enabled. Looks like light is passing through when directional lighting is enabled. Also I get weird light pixles everywhere. I've used the same workflow for unreal for several years. But I'm new to unity. Could anyone help me out? 🙂

[deft fiber]

Shadow casting in sharp corners and details is rarely fully leak-free, even with two-sided shadow casting
It's better to pad the walls with shadows-only blocks or planes from the outside

[swift shore]

Thanks, appreciate the answer. So a fix could be that I just give the walls some depth with a flat surface backwall for shadows.

[deft fiber]

That's right
Note that if the external plane is too close to the internal wall, it might let some light through, and the sharp corners of the external wall are also seen as gaps by the shadow caster meaning at specific light angles where two interior and exterior corners line up there can still be leakage

Exterior wall too close

proper padding

Two-sided walls only, for comparison

[swift shore]

that's super helpful thanks!

[fading aurora]

Where does the global illumination coming from

I disabled them

even when I remove the metallic effect from materials, it is still not pitch black

[deft fiber]

Try Environment Lighting Source: color with a black color instead of skybox

You may need to set Environment Reflections Intensity Multiplier to 0 as well

[blazing tusk]

why is it like this when i play my game?

[deft fiber]

I guess you did something to make it "like this"

[fading aurora]

I did

[fading aurora]

ah this did the job

tyy

[fading aurora]

what is the best way to diminize that flare at the wall

[manic prawn]

how i can blend the light maps to get rid of seams?

[timber lichen]

Hello guys

How is this scene in terms of lighting ?

[swift shadow]

pretty spectacular

[timber lichen]

in what way?

[swift shadow]

Just the way you have arranged the lights

[timber lichen]

What wrong with them

[night shell]

way too dark for what it should be

the fact that its also just realtime lighting doesn't help it neither

I would expect some skylighting to come in and illuminate the bathroom through the window

and those spotlights to be bright but also providing bounce light and making the bathroom look pretty luminous (since its realtime there is zero bounce)

the reflections also are wrong and I can tell are just sampling reflections from the sky only, not the enviorment

[timber lichen]

How could I block the light from overlapping from the bathroom to this room?

[manic prawn]

@timber lichen Enable shadows to each light

[manic prawn]

I pretty much fix that, btw it's a big map for mobile, i need to keep size small, I add some extra indirect samples and disable the Direct filter, denoiser and indirect filter

[timber lichen]

its on

[manic prawn]

Can you give me the model? i want to try bake the light

[timber lichen]

well its an entire cabin...

[night shell]

switch the mode to realtime, enable shadows on the realtime light, then switch back to baked

[deft fiber]

can you show the baked lightmap asset preview from here?

I'm curious to see what kind of lightmap layout those resolution and padding settings generate in a very modular scene like yours

[pure ruin]

Hello guys, I'm working on a low poly game for mobile but I'm having some problems with the baking phase.
The shadows results very pixelated and blocking on certaing areas, and I can't figure out how to solve this problem.

Can anyone give me some tips to fix those issues? I set everything on static and watched multiple documentation about some lightmap issues but didn't got the right solution for my problem. I'm using the URP in Unity version 2019.4.40f1

[void tusk]

Could someone tell me how to fix the shadow cascades reversing the shadows at their intersection? I've tried googling but can't seem to find similar cases though I am certain someone else must have had the same issue.

This only happens in the build, not the editor

[void tusk]

I only have one quality setting so its not a discrepancy between editor quality setting and build quality setting

Same area in the editor

[timber lichen]

Does anyone know how can I fix this issue

[night shell]

whats the issue? the bright lighting?

just simply reduce the brightness of the light

[timber lichen]

ya in the middle

[night shell]

just reduce the brightness of the lights, there is too much light in that area

you could also get around it by using tonemapping

[night shell]

and tonemapping could help keep brightness values within an acceptable range so it doesn't blow out so quickly

[night shell]

hmm?

[timber lichen]

those are my settings

[night shell]

your settings are fine, its the lights that you have in the scene

[timber lichen]

oh tonemapping I never heard of that Ill look into that

ty

[vital jacinth]

Hello @turbid eagle spot lights are not working properly. please give me any solutions.....

[night shell]

are you using forward or deffered rendering?

[timber lichen]

How can I fix this ?

[little condor]

I assume you mean the missing geometry in the reflection? You weren't specific with "this".

Is that model marked as Static?

[vital jacinth]

Hey, I am new with unity. How to check this?
I didn't get render path option in unity 19 version.

[night shell]

well I can tell that your using URP, my geuss as to why your spot lights are not working is probably because your in forward rendering by default, and the problem with forward rendering is that you can only have a certain amount of realtime lights per object

[timber lichen]

ya sorry well you can see that the whole class is reflection into the window

[night shell]

you'll find this on the URP settings asset in your project

[vital jacinth]

You mean, Forward render means HDRP ?

[night shell]

nope

HDRP is a completely different rendering pipeline, you are currently on the URP rendering pipeline

the URP pipeline within it (depending on what version of unity/URP you currently have) has options for deffered or forward rendering

[vital jacinth]

I know about this

[vital jacinth]

Already I tried this URP setting... please check it

[night shell]

oh you already increased it, then yeah you've probably hit the limit of realtime lights]

per object

how to fix it?

[vital jacinth]

yes

please

[night shell]

well either 1. you can split up your meshes into different objects, but that can be a pain
or the classic way 2. is use baked lighting

easiest way to fix I'd say is using baked lighting

but that also depends on your project and if you require realtime lighting

[vital jacinth]

I tried backed lighting. But after backed, black spots are coming like this

[night shell]

because of improper lightmap UVs

those are usually easy to fix, within unity for your model import settings you can enable lightmap UV generation

make sure its baked

not mixed

mixed still has a realtime component to the lighting

and therefore is still tied to that per object light limit

[little condor]

So are you saying the missing reflections aren't the problem? You will have to be more specific to what the issue is then.

[night shell]

^^^

not to dogpile but its tough to figure out what you are seeing as an issue in that example, if you mean that you don't like the reflections on the glass reflecting the classroom you can either get rid of the reflection probe, or you can make it so the glass meshes on those windows are sampling reflections just from the sky only

if your meaning that you don't like the reflection because it doesn't look right then enable box projection on the reflection probe and position it best to fit the bounds of the room

[timber lichen]

ya the reflection is just too much

[night shell]

too much as in too bright?

the reflection probe has an intensity field on it for reducing the brightness of the reflection, but you can also reduce it in a way by making the glass more transparent

[vital jacinth]

After baking, look like this.
Still some spotlight is not working after the baking

[night shell]

can you turn on the gizmos so I can see where you've placed your lights?

and also are you sure that all of the lights are infact set to baked?

[vital jacinth]

You can check the placements of the lights.

[night shell]

ok so what about my next question @

whoops sent to early

[night shell]

this one

[vital jacinth]

Yes

[night shell]

Baked, not mixed/realtime

just double checking

and if they are, the next thing is to switch your scene to baked lightmap view, and see if those lights are showing up

if your lights are all infact set to baked, and the light is not showing up in the baked lightmap view then its possible that some of the lights that you placed are inside geometry and are being occluded

this isn't really an easy thing to spot especially if you stuck with realtime lighting up to this point, since realtime lighting is imperfect and leaks through stuff all the time so make sure that all of your lights are not inside geometry

[vital jacinth]

Which lighting mode should be used during baking?

[night shell]

I recomend subtractive

its the cheapest

for your lightmapping settings also

to make it go faster

you can drop your sample counts quite a bit

[vital jacinth]

okk... Will check

[night shell]

i.e.
Direct Samples (you had 32) - you can drop it to 16 but 32 is fine
Indirect Samples (you had 512) - drop to 64 (or 32 for faster)
Enviorment Samples (you had 256) - drop to 64 (or 32 for faster)

when you dial in your lighting you can always bump up those numbers for better quality

[vital jacinth]

Hey, Still working. Check it

How is it?

[night shell]

looks to be working

[vital jacinth]

But it is possible to make a spot light work without baking?

[night shell]

yes, by splitting up the amount of objects that are intersecting with the light

remember, the limit is the amount of lights PER object

but I would honestly avoid that, as the reason that limit is put into place is that having that amount of realtime lights can be really really expensive

[vital jacinth]

ohhh ok

Also post processing is not working

[night shell]

you have to enable it on your camera in the scene

and make sure that the volume trigger for it is also set to post processing layer

[vital jacinth]

Yes, I did

Here is the camera setting

[vital jacinth]

yes. It's on post processing layer

[night shell]

why is your camera game object layer set to post process?

also your volume mask is still set to default

not to the post process layer

[vital jacinth]

still not working

[night shell]

hmm not sure what it could be then

I would ask in the URP #archived-urp thread

since you are using URP

[vital jacinth]

@night shell Thank you so much for helping me 🙂

[timber lichen]

Hello guys

Do you think these cones need lightmaps ?

they are much brighter in reality and the light is not hitting them

so im just wondering since im not sure, I am new to lighting in Unity

[night shell]

the problem there looks to be more of a reflection issue than a lighting issue

but I would suggest looking into lightprobes @timber lichen

[neat sparrow]

My guy over here looks fully white from the secondary camera. In the bottom left, you can see him as fully black with no shading (intended). Why is it showing up weirdly here, through the render texture?

Camera

Render texture (which i just noticed is showing the correct image)

UI

I messed with the settings of the rt for a while and eventually found this. Now it works. Not sure why.

[buoyant tartan]

Hello! Deferred rendering is causing light to bleed through surfaces it should not, but forward rendering does not have this issue. Is there a way to force forward rendering on shaders/materials/mesh renderers? (I cannot use custom scripts)

^Deferred (light bleeds through)

^Forward (How I want it to look)

[gloomy ember]

im making a 2d game where you have to navigate in the dark with a torch, how do i make my scene really dark?

i tried making the ambient colour dark and reducing the intensity multiplier but it doesnt seem to work

im mainly using 2d sprites in my scene

[modern mauve]

How do i make textured objects be effected by light?

[deft fiber]

This depends if you're working in 2D or 3D and what shaders your materials are using
Normally you don't need to "do" anything

Even in a blank project you can just make a new material, assign a texture, throw it on a mesh and it'll be affected by lights in the scene

[modern mauve]

3D and when i add it the texture is fully light no matter how little or how much light i shine on it

[deft fiber]

This really doesn't help me help you

[modern mauve]

The texture is not effected by light

[deft fiber]

Okay, but you haven't shown the materials or shaders or lights or scene or render pipeline or any other relevant info
And it sounds like you haven't tried if the lights fail in a blank scene using default assets

[timber lichen]

dman

its been stuck like this

for 40 minutes while baking

[earnest sluice]

how can i make lightining like this

[deft fiber]

Not sure precisely but to the best of my knowledge that's not "lighting" at all, rather they're projected shadows using decals or shaders with the help of specialized RT cameras

[dapper badger]

I have a issue with lighting being "darker" in build than in editor. How can I fix this? It's URP

[night shell]

orrrr, just do 4 point/spot lights that cast shadows

[night shell]

looks like a linear/gamma space issue?

[dapper badger]

How could I fix this?

[deft fiber]

That's another option but if you've got a whole stadium to light they're going to struggle

[night shell]

true

[night shell]

I would ask in the URP forum I'm not to familiar with URP myself

from the outset it looks like a linear/gamma color space issue

[maiden lynx]

guys how do i make an object being illuminated by itself too? I want to make basically a sun, but since the light is inside it, its model doesn't get illuminated

[deft fiber]

You'd rather use an emissive material for that

[maiden lynx]

got it thanks

[brittle geyser]

How does the angle weighted normals mode work on the mesh importer? I'm trying to figure out if I can get flat shading on a dynamically generated mesh w/o duplicating the verts

[deft fiber]

Normals: Calculate with smoothing angle 0 gives you a flat shaded mesh, but it still duplicates verts as you'd expect

You can use a shader such as this
https://hextantstudios.com/unity-flat-low-poly-shader/
to render smooth shaded meshes with flat normals

[fringe notch]

Does anyone know what's wrong with my lighting? It creates weird, pixelated shadows despite nothing actually casting the shadows. Looks almost like an artifact.

[lavish perch]

yeah hmmm

[deft fiber]

Can't see them on the screenshot but description sounds like texel invalidity
https://forum.unity.com/threads/faq-blocky-artifacts-appear-when-i-bake-a-scene-how-can-i-fix-them.951444/

[fringe notch]

look at the drawer

black spots

[lavish perch]

quite peculiar

[deft fiber]

Check UV overlap and texel invalidity in scene window debug views as the first thing

[night shell]

if your using baked lighting then generate lightmap UVs on that mesh

if it isn't then its likely just improper normals on the mesh itself, or improper normal maps

[brittle geyser]

@deft fiber Fantastic, thank you for the help

[little mason]

if i delete everything in this folder manually, and then rebake, will everything work as intended or by deleting stuff, will i jack something up

[night shell]

it will work as intended and rebake those assets

[little mason]

and deleting the top left LightingData.asset file wont cause any issue either?

[night shell]

no

LightingData stores lightprobe and other misc data I believe, but that will be regenerated

[little mason]

wonderful. worst case i can delete changes since im using source control but i wanted to ask before I spent the whole time baking

[little mason]

so i have one more question. Here is my scenes baked lighting with the lights on. The lights then turn off after a tv commercial plays and then they are off for the rest of the game. is there a way that I can have the lights on baked lighting swap out for a lights off baked lighting? I can't do realtime as this is a vr game and oculus is very strict about performance.

[night shell]

yes there is a way, I wouldn't know how to do it because I've never had to do it myself but it shouldn't be hard in theory

you bake a set of lightmaps for when the lights are on, and then bake another set of lightmaps (not overriding the current ones) for when the lights are off. And you simply just swap the lightmap textures whenever you need to

[little mason]

if I drag the lightmap files out of the default folder and then bake again, will it override?

just wanna ask before it bakes for 45 minutes

[night shell]

no

[timber lichen]

Any good ideas to making places dark with baked lights. Like being able to turn lamps on and off, with baked lights?

Or thats completely impossible

[little condor]

You can bake your scene just using your ambient light, for example a gradient or HDRI sky, to get a dark ambient bake. Then you use real-time lights to add brightness where you need it. When you turn those lights off the ambient/dark bake will remain. Adding light-probes to scene can help too.

[timber lichen]

Oh that’s interesting

I may try that

I use HDRP also

[little condor]

Cool. If you use HDRP, try adding the Indirect Lighting Controller as an override to your Volume and play with the settings to adjust the exposure level of the lightmap. It's really handy for tuning the amount of amount of baked light being show.

[manic prawn]

Does the low poly + reflections looks good?

[civic viper]

it looks like the wheels have more detail then the rest of thr car lol

[lost granite]

anybody know what's going on here? not even baked or mixed works when I bake the lighting, i checked and everything looks in order, and even with the pixel light count at absurd numbers its still not casting any light whatsoever. restarting did nothing, this is unity 2020.3.35f1 on the built-in render pipeline targeting android

no weird business with layers either cos the directional light in the scene works as expected

turning off the direction light reveals that the light seems to have been getting into the baked lightmap data on the object around it but the bilboard its facing isnt lighting up at all

this is the mesh renderer component for the object

oh huh

i guess the value was so high it just wasnt showing up?

alright problem solved dont worry lmao

[deft fiber]

What was it?

[timber lichen]

why is my wall green?
This happened after i baked my light
for the 3rd time now

[night shell]

could be alot of things, either

1. your material for the wall is actually green,
2. you have green lights in your scene, or it could be a mixture of yellow/blue lights that amount to a green light
3. it looks like it could also be green bounce lighting that is actually supposed to be elsewhere in the map and the reason its showing up is because of improper lightmap UVs

I would ask if you could show us how your scene looks in the baked lightmap view

[timber lichen]

damn I just cleared the baking

Im doing an other one

just realised the wall doesnt have lightmap UV's

rebaking now to see if it fixed the issues

[timber lichen]

ok I just finished my baking

and still have the same issues

[night shell]

.

[timber lichen]

@night shell

[night shell]

thats a singular lightmap

I'm asking to switch your scene mode to the baked lightmap view mode

so it just shows the scene with the lightmaps

[timber lichen]

like this?

[night shell]

yep

I can see some issues right away

disable the lightmap checkerborading

[night shell]

yeah so I'm seeing alot of issues, some objects look ok but there are a ton that have issues

worst of all your walls and ceiling are not even baked

one thing I would do before moving forward

on all of your mesh files @timber lichen

enable lightmap UV generation

and make sure that all the objects that you want included in the bake are infact marked static/contribute GI

then bake again

should help fix most of your issues

[timber lichen]

well I create the lightmaps for the ceilling on maya but I guess that messed up

[night shell]

have unity do it for you

generally in my experience it tends to do a good job

[timber lichen]

so only contribute GI should be checked

[night shell]

no, just saying that make sure it is infact checked

for the objects that you do want to be baked with lightmaps

[lost granite]

got literally zero clue, I just turned things off and on and rebaked a bunch until it fixed itself

my guess was that the light intensity was so high that it wasn’t showing up

but i’m pretty sure I tried low intensities too

[brittle geyser]

Can someone explain to me what I am not understanding below?

If a mesh's verts are reused across multiple faces, the normals will be smooth (unless mesh is modified by the importer).

Now, say we have a cube, it's possible in a 3D software to have the front face's uvs to basically be from (0, 0) to (1, 1) with top right vertex being (1, 1).

Simultaneously, it is possible for the right face's top left corner/vertex to be something other than (1, 1). It could be anything based on how the mesh is unwrapped.

Now if uvs are per vertex, and the mesh is smooth so (afaik) vertices are reused across faces, how is the above scenario possible?

e.g. top right vertex of front face is (1, 1), how is it possible for the right face's top left vertex to have a different value if they reuse verts?

Ah, it says blender's uvs are per "face vertex", so each face has a definition for its own vertices. I don't think unity has a concept of that, so it's my understanding that unity duplicates the vertices by default(regardless of smooth normals or not) in order to replicate that behaviour.

Unless this is horribly wrong, safe to ignore the above

[cursive quartz]

Hello Guys got a problem why i cant apply ovverride to a prefab??? even in prefab i cant uncheck the checkbox its all gray why?

[cursive quartz]

i know but why is not possible?

[brittle geyser]

It is a prefab generated by unity mesh importer. Right click -> prefab -> unpack completely, then drag it back into your project to create a new one.

[night shell]

not sure, but if I had to geuss its probably due to the fact that you'd have to modify the asset itself which is something that mabye unity avoids doing?

either way, a way around it is to just unpack the model prefab completely, and make a new prefab of it

looks like @brittle geyser beat me too it 😛

[cursive quartz]

its very annoying that all of my trees have recrieved shadows i will use them many so and then 1 by 1 uncheck is time consuming

[cursive quartz]

ill give a try

[cursive quartz]

i cant find this Unpack Completely , or should i do it outside unity?

[brittle geyser]

Take the prefab generated by unity from the project window and drag it into the hierarchy. An instance will appear in your scene which I assume you are familiar with.

In the hierarchy, right click that instance, go to prefab and then unpack completely. This basically says : This precise instance will no longer be considered a prefab.

Then, grab that object, from the hierarchy again, and drag it into your project window to create a new prefab

Project window is where your assets are displayed, hierarchy window is where your scene's content is displayed

[cursive quartz]

Yes i got it i just didnt know about this unpack complettly thank you 🙂 both

[pliant gazelle]

how to make lightmapping also work on all the LODs?

[deft fiber]

Afaik the polygons will share vertices if they share all attributes

Otherwise verts will be split

[brittle geyser]

Ah this makes perfect sense, thanks @deft fiber

I was really confused when unity imported a cube with 20 verts

[deft fiber]

Normals, UVs, vertex groups, vertex colors and tangents are all the same vector data to the format I believe

[timber lichen]

Does anyone know how to fix these shadows artifacts?

[timber lichen]

@night shell sup

[night shell]

looks like in here its texel validity artifacts

which are caused typically by backfaces

switch your scene to Texel Validity view

[timber lichen]

oh damn

this looks bad

[night shell]

you have alot of backfaces in that area leading to those artifacts it looks like

so to fix it

I would first like to see a screenshot of your scene both in the regular scene view and in the baked lightmap view

[timber lichen]

You know how I could fix this

[night shell]

yes

but im asking for more information so we see exactly what needs to be done to fix it

[timber lichen]

oh sry did not see your other message

[night shell]

can you get a wider view?

again with both modes

from what I can see there, its hard to tell but your ceiling is not lightmapped which can certainly be causing alot of that, but hard to tell since I don't know what other meshes are around

[night shell]

ahhhh I think I see it

[timber lichen]

oh

[night shell]

your ceiling is not lightmapped which can certainly be causing that, but also most likely you have backfaces around the intersection of the column with the windows

backfaces for the record is basically geometry that is culled from behind

but when you look at those backfaces in the scene view straight on the geometry is seethrough

make sense?

[timber lichen]

ya

look at my UV's

all overlapping

[brittle geyser]

Anybody knows how unity generates lightmap uvs under the hood?

[timber lichen]

mhh

well

I just fixed the uv

so ima do other bake to see

[night shell]

you could also have unity generate the lightmap UVs for you

[timber lichen]

are these settings good?

[timber lichen]

I know it was the base UV's that were messed up

[night shell]

well what I'm saying is to have unity generate those lightmap UVs, do a test bake and if those problems don't arise anymore then its just a matter of fixing your lightmap UVs

but in the examples that you just provided

its not a lightmap UV issue

its a mesh backface issue

when lightmapping, when there are rays that hit backfaces they will be terminated because backfaces are usually always culled. Its the "backside" of geometry that you don't render so to speak

[night shell]

thats what the texel validity view also shows

around the column and windows you have backfaces on your geometry that are causing those issues

granted... there is a possibility I am wrong, but to save yourself some time I suggest going through a checklist like so

1. let unity generate lightmap UVs for your geometry, then do a bake (if no problems arise and it all looks realtively good and clean then its your lightmap UVs that need fixing)
2. if those problems are still there even after having unity generate lightmap UVs then its most likely a mesh backface issue that needs to be solved there. This can either be solved by fixing the normals and plugging any holes in that geometry that would contribute to those artifacts, OR you could in the unity material settings you can enable double sided global illumination

[night shell]

also as a note to help speed up your lightmapping process and testing you can drop the sample counts even more

1. Direct Samples = 32
2. Indirect Samples = 32
3. Enviorment Samples = 32

[timber lichen]

oh damn that's bad

even in Maya its black

btw it says my UV,s are still overlapping even I fixed it on maya @night shell

[night shell]

what UV channel

[timber lichen]

normal

[night shell]

channel 0 or 1

lightmap UVs for unity are on uv channel 1

[timber lichen]

how do i check that

[night shell]

no idea I'm not that experienced with UV mapping in maya

[timber lichen]

oh i tought you meant Unity

well its on channel 0

there's only 1 channel

I tought that Unity creates channel 1 for the light uv's

[night shell]

it does when you generate a lightmap UV

or

if you enable lightmap UV generation

but you can also make your own

and it'll use that

[timber lichen]

ok well no idea why it says its overlapping when its clearly not

damn

brb

[night shell]

honestly I tend to ignore it since UV overlaps in my experience never really seem to cause any massive issues

unity complains about it alot but when I go through lightmapping on my own projects the results I get are always fine

if the baked lightmap looks good and acceptable that is what matters

[night shell]

also that looks like a mesh normals issue

you have smooth normals on

[brittle geyser]

Can someone explain to me what this line means :

A good UV set for lightmaps should adhere to the following rules:It should be within the [0,1] x [0,1] UV space.

0,1 x 0,1 specifically - So not (0,0) - (1, 1)?

[night shell]

within the 0..1 space, so they mean that for the max X (horizontal) position should be from 0 to 1. for the max Y (vertical) position it should be from 0 to 1

think of it as a coordinate plane

actually it is a coordinate plane

[deft fiber]

I think you had the right idea to start with but were thrown off by the wording

[brittle geyser]

@deft fiber Aye
@night shell Appreciate the clarifications, thanks

[timber lichen]

so apparantly I have to make my normal UV's bigger

and the lightmap UV's smaller

[night shell]

says who?

[timber lichen]

my friend

[night shell]

I know I keep pushing it but why not again just have unity generate those lightmap UVs for you and just call it a day

[timber lichen]

I still get the same issue

[night shell]

did you screenshot it?

because then we can diagnois eit

[night shell]

not the UV chart

[night shell]

but of how the final scene looks even with the unity generated lightmap UVs

[timber lichen]

he said lightmaps uv on unity crushes the normal uvs

[night shell]

not sure what he means there but if you still had the same issues even with the unity generated UVs it sounds like its not a UV issue

and from what you showed it looks to be a backfaces issue, which the texel validity screenshot you sent prior also confirms

@deft fiber am I wrong? correct me pls if I am I don't want to accidentally be spewing misinformation

[night shell]

these were his results

[deft fiber]

I would've given this advice as well

But it doesn't seem Bat is following either step

In a nutshell let Unity generate lightmaps automatically by enabling it in mesh import settings, instead of fumbling with them manually

And then fix the texel invalidity by making sure there's no exposed backfaces

Normals don't have to be great as long as they're pointing outwards and there's no gaps in geometry

[timber lichen]

hey guys im really newbie in baked lightning usually i just bake it and it works for me so im cool with it, but now im in HDRP and trying to bake lights give me no results it goes black, it does apply lightmaps to my static objects around it but it doesnt glow at all, does anyone know why could that be?

[night shell]

I would suggest asking in #archived-hdrp

[deft fiber]

The progressive lightmapper works almost exactly the same way across render pipelines
The problem may be with some other HDRP setting
Either way most baking problems are solved by doing very small and simple test scene bakes, starting with default settings, until you get the process ironed out

[timber lichen]

i managed to get lightning somewhat going now, but what im having issues now is my ceiling doesnt light up and other parts of scene do, im not sure why is that

[timber lichen]

could it be because my ceiling is a plane?

should i set it to double sided? or that doesnt matter?

[deft fiber]

I can't say anything for sure by this description alone, but backfaces should not be exposed to reflected light rays when baking

[timber lichen]

yeah but setting some other objects to double sided really changed how lightning went so il try doing that before anything else

[deft fiber]

I'd have to see what "changed how lighting went" looks like actually to give more feedback
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/ There's over twenty potential issues, by symptom, so not much point guessing

[timber lichen]

bro no chance in the world I am reading that, lol but il keep trying till it works

thanks tho

[deft fiber]

Though this is a minuscule fraction of the amount of knowledge you need in game dev, it's often enough in this case that you skim the problem titles and example pictures to spot the same issues your scene could be suffering from

If you find the matching problem, then you'd read about the potential causes and fixes

[timber lichen]

i mean i honestly think its because its planes and not 3d object, i can not see other reason why would something like this occur, so untill i clear my doubts i wont be reading that , but might use it later who knows thanks for informing me there is such guide though

i found the issue

it was due to my material metallic on the ceiling was 1, imagine dropping it to 0.99 alone solved the issue

almost done

[deft fiber]

Planes are 3D geometry just as much as cubes, quads and spheres

[timber lichen]

yes but they only block light from one side if not set to double sided in material properties

so they arent much the same in lightning

[deft fiber]

Meshes with exposed backfaces are a type of non-manifold geometry
Normally realtime lights pass through, but baked light rays become entirely terminated causing texel invalidity

[tawdry birch]

Has anyone hacked a point light to emit shadows instead? Where the pixels are darkened instead, such as using a multiply filter

[deft fiber]

The editor interface doesn't allow negative colors values, but you can assign them to lights with a script

[timber lichen]

how can you make the inside of a room darker? but at the same time keep the outside a sunny day?
the interior of the house is underground but it still looks bright..

[timber lichen]

nvm, Ambient Color does the job

[deft fiber]

Yes, but it means you can't have ambient lighting inside of the house
Separating ambient lights from different areas is tricky, as realtime lighting doesn't really have a way to know what's indoors and what's outdoors

Precomputed and baked lighting aims to solve that

[timber lichen]

yeah,but now i have this problem,i wanna have the light to flash from white to red but it makes the walls to look like this,any ideas?

[deft fiber]

Probably hitting realtime light limit for those meshes so the light is ignored for them

[timber lichen]

huh,i do have realtime and baked lights,imma test this

[timber lichen]

is there a way to fix it?

[deft fiber]

<#archived-lighting message> here's some notes about it

The limit of 8 is specific to URP, but so is forward+ rendering path

[timber lichen]

thats a whole area i dont know about 🥲

this is such a pain

imma just do with what i have

thank you sm for the help ^^

[eager coyote]

Question: not sure what Unity would refer to this as, but is there a way to create multiple baked indirect lightmaps for the same geometry? Basically just looking to avoid using realtime lighting for lights that don't move but that can be switched on and off independently of one another. Not too familiar with Unity's lighting, sorry.

[obtuse nest]

that is total realism👍 👍

[timber lichen]

its not done yet lol

[fierce lynx]

wasn't getting this issue before, but now when I bake my lighting it applies the lightmap completely wrong

basically errors like this all over the scene.

Started happening after I just added more objects to another section of the scene

[jaunty abyss]

How can i make my Custom ShaderGraph work with 2d lighting in URP?

[deft fiber]

Overlapping lightmap UVs, probably because meshes don't have generate lightmap UVs options enabled, and texel invalidity

https://forum.unity.com/threads/faq-blocky-artifacts-appear-when-i-bake-a-scene-how-can-i-fix-them.951444/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/

[fierce lynx]

Went through and enabled it on a load of things

Issue is a lot of its probuilder

Is there a way to fix it for that?

It's just strange, since I never had the issue before. Even with the overlap messages

[vocal haven]

Loading scene with editor -> Ambient lighting fine

Loading scene with script additively runtime / build / editor -> Ambient lighting stays same as before

New scene IS set to the be the active scene

Tried doing DynamicGI.UpdateEnvironment();

what am I missing?

seems like a Unity bug that has persisted since Unity 5 all the way to Unity 2020 with a wall of questions on the forums and no proper answer

there are NO lightmaps, it's all dynamic objects

light baking Auto Generate is turned OFF

just nothing works...

help please 🥹

[fierce lynx]

I'm now getting a weird issue where sometimes after baking, if I try to go into UV overlap view it runs at like 1 fps

this issue

WOW restarting unity made the lightmap actually map properly

xD

what a strange bug

[deft fiber]

ProBuilder meshes have a lot of potential issues and weirdness when used for light baking or other such purposes, up until you export them out of it
They're largely procedural meshes with their data controlled by ProBuilder so other features can run into errors when attempting to modify them or utilize their temporary mesh data

[weak jolt]

I'm having trouble with lighting.. I'm doing it in a 2D project, I've got my Sprite-Lit-Default material on everything, and I've got a URP 2D light asset active, but nothing is going black like it should be

Looking for anything I should double check since this is my first time working with 2D lighting

[edgy aurora]

Hi, are there any common practices for optimising a scene with a wide array of realtime lights? I'm having an issue where my lights/materials show up perfectly in the editor, but loses its material whenever I build for anything, whether that'd be Desktop or WebGL

[hot path]

Im trying to make a snowy forest level for my game, and im having a weird issue where I have a minimap light, and it renders like this in the editor (expected) and I have a script to disable the light for the main camera, in OnPreCull(). This works if I build and run in the editor, however If I build the game and run it from disk, the trees will be lit up by the minimap camera (the ground is still dark).

maybe this is a similar issue to above?

im on 2021.3.9f1 btw

[toxic eagle]

Hey super confused here, the lamps are all the same prefab, im using an emission glow on the bulb and and spot light to give it the light effect on the floor, why are some spotlights working and anothers not?

[mellow sierra]

Don't crosspost please. @toxic eagle

[deft fiber]

Looks like pixel light limits per object
<#archived-lighting message>

[night shell]

you know when raytracing becomes the norm these problems and questions won't really be a thing anymore 😛

[eager coyote]

don't really need raytracing to resolve this though

i'm feeling like the ground there consists of multiple objects and i suspect those lights aren't baked

[night shell]

not saying he should switch, but just making an irrelevant note

[eager coyote]

yeah mb, I'm just musing because I have nothing better to do lmao

[night shell]

but yeah those are for certain realtime lights, and the ground is split up into multiple meshes. so per pixel light limit is definetly the problem there

[eager coyote]

honestly wish there were a slightly less clunky solution to UV tiling than making multiple materials

because it inevitably leads new users to the mesh tiling issue

like I have several copies of a material with different tiling because I'm using it on planes of varying sizes, but years ago I'd have definitely went "well I guess I should just duplicate the mesh over and over

[deft fiber]

In the more immediate future this problem should be history when forward+ rendering path becomes the norm
The problem isn't really a lack of technology, but where people's knowledge and the tools available fail to connect
If the exact same question pops up multiple times a week I think that's a sign that the tools are not doing enough to guide users away from that kind of pitfall

Adding a little notification on the light component when it's getting culled which links to a light troubleshooting guide with each option summarized would be a trivial effort

Even if the user figures out what the problem is, the knowledge of all the solutions is completely scattered
Forward+ isn't mentioned in almost any thread because it's a new system

[deft fiber]

Duplicating planes and creating new material instances for each works but has the elegance of duct tape
A better and more performant solution is to make all geometry as meshes with one material, but a different UV map
On average renderers handle multiple meshes with different UVs better than one type of mesh with many materials
An better and quicker solution is to use a triplanar mapping shader

[eager coyote]

I mean yes the most performant solution is to just turn your entire level geometry into one mesh with one texture and UV map it lmao

but that's something I have to write a tool for at some point

shouldn't be hard, just finnicky

unless probuilder or something can do this already; I've never actually used it lmao

[deft fiber]

Not always, but it's one of the viable options

[eager coyote]

well in my case all the prefabs i have planned out are small enough to where it's definitely the most effective

if you're working in an "open world" scenario, then not so much

[deft fiber]

This tick here already does that, and it supports occlusion and frustum culling too

[eager coyote]

hmm

well that's handy, I don't use unity much so I wasn't aware of it

everything where I work is custom lmao

which also leads to an incredible amount of tech debt

[deft fiber]

Guaranteed payroll for coders

There's also GPU instancing for rendering a lot of the same thing, and SRP batching with URP/HDRP that's quite magical

[eager coyote]

honestly we need more programmers just to clean this shit up without losing steam on actual development...but I digress lmao

[eager coyote]

not sure how Unity handles either of these. i wrote a custom mesh batcher for an internship last summer and it worked but fml directx12 instancing is a PITA

[deft fiber]

From my perspective that too is just one checkbox

[eager coyote]

i'm sure they've had a ton of work put into them, but now I want to read the docs because I like to know how things are working under the hood

it's less that I don't trust the tool and more that I feel like a skid if I just use tools other people make without understanding how they work

by skid i mean script kiddie

uncertain how widespread that slang is but I don't wanna get warned for something I didn't intend lmao

also going to repost a question I never got a response to: is there some kind of multi lightmapping tool in Unity already? Asking since each light in these prefabs should be able to be on/off or flicker, and I would like direct shadowing in most cases

[deft fiber]

I'm not a coder so I'm completely unburdened by worries like that
Though in turn I suffer insisting to not use any art assets from others

[eager coyote]

I am very inexperienced with how Unity handles lighting

[eager coyote]

i had to bite the bullet on not using external assets when it comes to textures sadly

and tbh I'll probably have to do it again if/when I add NPCs lmao

using external models/etc. is always awkward because they're often set up differently from how I set things up and how other external models are set up, but that's neither here nor there

[eager coyote]

additionally: thinking that I want fully baked lighting for hallways/rooms the player isn't in and to just enable/disable realtime lighting accordingly, since typically the player's only view into other rooms will be through doorways and there won't generally be dynamic entities around

so basically I want to store separate lightmaps for baked direct and indirect lighting and have no idea if this is feasible through Unity

[deft fiber]

I think it is with some jury rigging, but what problem is it to solve

[eager coyote]

trying to avoid too much realtime lighting, basically

generally you shouldn't over-optimize before something becomes an issue, but imo it's best to at least keep in mind what performance issues you might run into

[spark pawn]

Hallo! With baked lighting, does the Progressive lightmapper take alpha clip into consideration? Like tree branch and grass cards?

[night shell]

yes

[spark pawn]

Thanks, I was testing a custom amplify shader with the shadow clip not working for baked lighting. Using Unity's default shaders seems to work tho. Would you have any idea as to what I could be missing? A pass or tag potentially?

[night shell]

meta pass

meta pass is used by lightmapper to pull data about the material

[spark pawn]

Ah okay thanks! The meta pass is included by default so it's curious why it's not working by then.

As a standin for my lack of knowledge it might be better to bake the shadows with a shader that works and then switch it out for the custom shader that I wanted?

[tiny aspen]

I'm trying to implement Terraria-like lightning system. Brightness of whole sprite is the same, but decreases with distance from light source. I'm currently using URP. I've made a few attempts, but none of them was really successful. Can anyone suggest which way I should research? Stick to the materials with custom shaders and change brightness of individual tiles? Second tilemap with "shadows" to cover bright tiles? Play with light cookies? Or there is awesome tool I've overlooked?

[icy tundra]

Could just be using vertex colors updated on the cpu

[deft fiber]

You'd start by outlining what your lighting system needs to do
Should it be dynamic per-tile, or per object?
Should solid blocks occlude light or reduce its intensity?
Should multiple lights stack?
Should there be differently colored lights?
What's the largest distance a light source could be visible off screen?
Do tiles or gameobjects often need to evaluate their brightness?

These are pretty complicated systems, mostly due to the sheer number of tiles there are to update

If the light sources don't need to move much, you might be able to get away with looping tiles or vertices in an increasing radius around the light and add brightness to their vertex color, or to just update "light tiles" on another overlapping tilemap

The way terraria does it, I think, is to have another tilemap which runs a naive outline algorithm around every light emitting tile

Most 2D tile games have something like that, usually fancier algorithms so lights can be circular falloff and be occluded or even cast directional shadows

Most of them would require using a compute shader or the job system to produce anything performant enough for realtime use, I assume

You might be able to get a similar effect using urp's 2D lights if you pixelate their values in a tilemap shader, which would be incredibly fast for a limited number of lights
Reverse engineering integrated shaders is incredibly tedious though

[tiny aspen]

Thanks for all the advice. Currently Tile values are stored in Dictionary<int y, Dictionary<int x, int tileValue>> and placed on tile map only on demand. I'm worried that second tilemap will hit performance hard, what also makes idea of dynamic shadows an overkill. I'll look into it after job, thank you.

[deft fiber]

Gaussian blur algorithms may work also in addition to outline algorithms, like the type used in bloom post processing

I think that one uses a compute shader internally

CPUs are terrible at repetitive tasks like spreading pixel color, especially if you aren't making use of multiple cores

[deft fiber]

And I forgot about jump flood algorithms, which can be really versatile and efficient

[uncut coral]

Is negative scale bad for lightmap baking?

[timber lichen]

damn yo

I tried everything and there's a glitch with light baking

[deft fiber]

I expect so, especially if combined with batching static

[deft fiber]

Looks like the same texel invalidity and possible UV overlap problem from before

Iirc last time you didn't confirm if you had done the suggested steps to solve those two problems or not

[timber lichen]

I tried everything bro

[deft fiber]

I guess it can't be helped then

[timber lichen]

the devil is working overtime

[deft fiber]

Very few options left after "everything" 😄

[hot path]

saying you tried everything is a great way to get yourself stuck in a very negative mindset for finishing what you are trying to do

[deft fiber]

The fixes I saw you trying seemed kind of esoteric and not exactly in line with our advice

[timber lichen]

I even tried to bake it in a different scene and there are no issues

so I feel like its an issue with the environment itself

I was also told to make the UV's of the first uv bigger than lightmap UV in maya

idk if you were there when I said that but I got that suggestion from my friend

and I always tought that UV's were supposed to say in the square , so that was kinda weird

[night shell]

the problem is not a lightmap UV issue

its a texel validity issue

we've talked about this before

you keep messing with the UVs when according to your information you were sitll getting issues even when you had unity generate lightmap UVs for your model

which means that its a texel validity issue

its a very different thing than UVs

texel validity

you have holes and backfaces in your geometry causing those artifacts to appear

@timber lichen

talk to me so we can work through this again

we're here to help

[night shell]

your friend is wrong, you should always ALWAYS try to keep or UVs within the square

[uncut coral]

Well...have to make more objects I guess. Tnx

[night shell]

and this has no bearing because UVs are on seperate channels

[timber lichen]

exactly

[night shell]

your first UVs (texcoord0) are always your model texture coordinates, the second UVs (texcoord1) are your lightmap UVs, they need to stay within the square.

granted for other applications the texcoords might have different uses but in unity from my experience it has always been texcoord0 - your main model texture, texcoord1 - your lightmap UVs

so first things first lets go through this again

show me your scene view in baked lightmap view mode @timber lichen

[timber lichen]

im doing an other bake atm

12 min left

[night shell]

what are your settings for the bake

lighting settings

I've suggested previously to make things go faster to reduce sample counts atleast for iteration/testing so you don't have to wait so long

[deft fiber]

I advised to put UVs to auto generate in Unity so there are no overlap issues and that you can reliably find out where the texel invalidity is actually originating from

I don't know why you keep trying to make them manually

[night shell]

WOAH

those are some LARGE sample counts

[deft fiber]

If you have a dedicated GPU then it's usually faster to bake on that too

[night shell]

^^^

I recomend for the sample counts...

Direct Samples - 32
Indirect Samples - 32
Enviorment Samples - 32

that should speed things up, and you shouldn't see a giant difference since unity always denoises the lightmap results

but that depends on how your scene is setup of course

I would also drop the resolution as well, that would make it go faster

[deft fiber]

I keep samples at the defaults (32 - 512 - 256) but decrease bake resolution when I want to speed things up
Either or both work

[night shell]

^^^

I would go for both just to speed things up so we can trouble shoot more quickly

send us a screenshot of the settings once you've applied them

||so we can confirm that you actually did it 😛 ||

also disabling progressive updates makes things go little faster as well

[timber lichen]

omg it worked

[night shell]

what did

let me geuss, enabling double sided global illumination on the materials?

[timber lichen]

no I have no idea

honestly

[night shell]

I'm seeing black borders on the geometry intersection

and you didn't have ambient occlusion enabled

[timber lichen]

that's the shadows I think

[night shell]

can you send a screenshot of the material that you use for the column?

its good its fixed, but not good that you don't know what it was that fixed it

but I'm pretty certain that double sided GI was enabled on the materials, it would produce that kind of effect

but it could also be that you added geometry to the inside of the walls/columns in an attempt to fix that texel validity issue

[night shell]

urp lit shader, render face set to both

doesn't that enable double sided GI @arctic isle ?

[arctic isle]

Keeping two different LightingSettingsAssets is the intended workflow for this, and swapping them based on need for speed ⚡ or if you're baking a scene for "production".

Things that increase bake times: sample counts, resolution, anti-aliasing samples, CPU Lightmapper, denoising, high res reflection probes, large number of light probes, max bounces + complex geometry. Also, in 2021+ using a high resolution with GPU Lightmapper can lead to higher bake times because of tiling for low-memory GPUs.

[timber lichen]

lol wtf

[arctic isle]

yes

[night shell]

so that answers that then

it was double sided GI

[night shell]

and there are still some artifacts

[night shell]

switch your scene view to texel validity

[night shell]

oof thats bad

I see some geometry also that isn't included in the bake

[timber lichen]

I might be cuz of the low settings

[night shell]

not necessarily

[timber lichen]

Direct Samples - 32
Indirect Samples - 32
Enviorment Samples - 32

thats bad

[arctic isle]

nope, you have backfaces in your scene

[night shell]

can you send a comparison of your regular scene view, with the baked lightmap view

[timber lichen]

the ceilling is a plane btw

[night shell]

because it looks like you have large portions of geometry not included in the bake

[timber lichen]

that makes no sense

[night shell]

which normally I suppose would be fine... except that this looks to be a primarily interior scene which means you would get alot of leakage

[night shell]

yep and show us your regular scene view of this exact angle

I'm certain that there is geometry that you are still not including and marking as ContributeGI static

[night shell]

yep

that entire left wall is not included and marked as Contribute GI static

[timber lichen]

ya the ceilling is staic and contributeGI

[night shell]

same with the back front wall

[night shell]

not the ceiling

your not reading what I'm saying

the left wall is not in the bake

you have the other side marked as contribute GI static

but not the left side in that classroom

so there is a bunch of backfaces

contributing to all of those artifacts

because that gap wasn't closed

[timber lichen]

OH FK

[night shell]

do you understand?

[timber lichen]

so it damages the ceilling even tho its not part of it

wtf

[night shell]

think of it like your plugging holes in your lightmap

[arctic isle]

the lightmapper is bouncing rays off of the backfaces and into the walls causing those artifacts

[night shell]

if you have holes, you'll have issues/leakage

hence the issues you were running into

thats also why I asked you show us a comparison with your regular scene view with the baked lightmap view so we can see what chunks of objects/meshes are missing from the lightmap

and as we saw, large portions of geometry were not included, and with how your meshes were modeled there were LARGE portions of backfaces exposed to areas, contributing to those artifacts that you've been struggling with

so mark all of those objects ContributeGI static, plug those holes. Then those issues should dissipate

One thing I do to make sure I avoid issues like this is whenever I create and light a scene is I ALWAYS mark ALL of my objects as ContributeGI static, then I go through and unmark objects that I don't need in the lightmap

its easier to exclude what you don't need, then include what you do need

@timber lichen

[velvet pulsar]

Guys, quick question about reflection probes

I have one big central reflection probes and some nested ones

in URP

when I enabled the nested ones, suddendly the sky is reflected in all the mesh

and idea why?

before

[velvet pulsar]

Any ideas?

[chilly kettle]

Did you bake them? Are the "hitboxes" of your new probes big enough to cover the whole mesh?

[velvet pulsar]

I bake them

The center probe is big enough to cover all the mesh, the other probes are partials

[chilly kettle]

Hm, should work imo.
Did you try to figure out which of the new probes is the problem?
Are the meshs / lights set to static?

[velvet pulsar]

mesh are static

[chilly kettle]

i think baked reflectionprobes only care for static objects?

hm weird 😄

[velvet pulsar]

yup

@chilly kettle want me to share the project?

its just a test for lighting with the sponza model

[chilly kettle]

Nah, sry, dont have the time dig that deep

[velvet pulsar]

NP

[chilly kettle]

i would recommend trying a new scene, or try to find out which probes causes the problem there.
Does a new 3d mesh like a standard unity cube has the same problem?

[native locust]

I got a question regarding the new material variants, I would be glad if someone could shed some light on this...

I want to be able to offset my UVs uniquely for any rendered mesh in my scene. First I was using unique meshes with the UVs baked into the mesh, all objects sharing the same material (an atlas). Now i've switched to 2022 and thought I could pull off the same thing with material variants. Instead of having a bunch of identical meshes only with different UVs I could have a single mesh and multiple material variants, each with a different UV offset.

Is there any down side to use material variants like this? I was thinking in relation to set pass calls.

from reading the docs Ive found this

Material Variants are not designed to address optimization and scalability concerns. In addition, it is not possible to use Material Variants to alter Materials at runtime in the Player.

To me it sounds like a solution to organise materials and would not necessarily preserve performance (comparing with my older unique mesh solution). However... I've done small test.. and have not been able to find any setpass increase (yet)

[chilly kettle]

Material variants are, as far as i know still increasing the drawcalls.
How many different offsets do you need? ^^

[native locust]

oh.. MANY

like.. 40-50 maybe

I have basically a variation of a minecraft looking setup.. with lots of cubes

[chilly kettle]

and how big is every part of the texture atlas you are offsetting now?

like 64x64 px?

or something?

[native locust]

Im using a small atlas right now, 256x256.. but this will increase in size over time.. right now each cube occupies around 16x16 pixels.. and I sample this kind of square all over the atlas. Some objects are larger though

Thats what we are talking about :I

In hind sight... I maybe shouldn't have jumped on the material variants wagon.. but it was new and shiny 🙂

[velvet pulsar]

@chilly kettle I forgot to mention that this happen when I have multiple probes inside the main one

like more than 1

[chilly kettle]

sadly im out of ideas 😄
I used them often as you did, without a problem

[velvet pulsar]

Is this supported in URP?

Maybe is a bug in my unity version?

[chilly kettle]

it should, i am on URP also

[velvet pulsar]

Im running out of ideas too haha

I will update my version

just in case

[chilly kettle]

i would create new scene, just with one big probe and a small inside of it and have a look if its working there

[timber lichen]

so seems like for now

the only issues left

and this was baked with 32 direct - indirect samples and environment samples

[chilly kettle]

did you try to increase the scale in lightmap there?

but i think you have another problem there

[timber lichen]

scale to what size?

[chilly kettle]

how big is your lightmap btw?

in pixels

[timber lichen]

1024 x 1024 ? right

@chilly kettle

[chilly kettle]

How does it look if you increase the size to 2048? ^^

[timber lichen]

nothing changes

[chilly kettle]

did you rebake it?

[timber lichen]

oh

forgot

could it be because the windows are opens

[chilly kettle]

in your room? 😄

[timber lichen]

no because I heard I could create problems

idk

[chilly kettle]

not really ^^

[timber lichen]

ok well ima rebake and see if anything changes

thanks for the tip

[chilly kettle]

did you watch any lightmapping tutorials?
I think you need the fundamentals of how lighting and lightmaps work in unity.

[timber lichen]

I have quite the basics

but learning as I go along

[chilly kettle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ4fl-KBDR8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnetI4-dNY

there are great infos

[chilly kettle]

yes, you MUST click that checkbox for every mesh you import and want to bake the light on.

[timber lichen]

already did

are these settings good?

[chilly kettle]

change it to GPU not CPU, or you wait for ages

[timber lichen]

mmh

im also doing editing on premiere pro

so idk if that will destroy my workflow

[chilly kettle]

well, its baked in 1-2 minutes, so it shouldnt 😄

[velvet pulsar]

@chilly kettle wanna hear something funny?

I updated the unity version. Problem solved

[chilly kettle]

lel

which version did you use?

[velvet pulsar]

2021.3.1f1

updated to 2022.2.7f1

[chilly kettle]

thats a huge step ^^

[velvet pulsar]

much faster btw

[night shell]

the settings there have nothing to do with that, not sure why you keep reverting to even higher and higher sample counts

[night shell]

the low sample counts don't contribute to these kinds of artifacts

the only artifacts that low sample counts introduce is noise

thats it

[night shell]

in these examples its not noise, it looks like once again texel validity issues

show us how it looks in the lightmap texel validity view

if it looks fine

then its your UVs that are wrong

this is an example of low sample counts and the artifacts it introduces

from their offical lightmapping troubleshooting guide

texel validity artifacts that you were running into

and improper UVs

@timber lichen

the source also for this, which might be of use is here -https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8466917

[night shell]

changing the lightmap scale won't fix his issue in that example, its a texel validity artifact

changing the resolution also won't really affect it or fix it

[night shell]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8466917

sorry, repeating info here but just making sure everything is answered

[night shell]

I'm inclined to agree but unless if you know what you are doing and the model itself has authored lightmap UVs then it isn't always necessary to do this

[night shell]

looking at some of these images your walls are not purely one sided meshes right?

[timber lichen]

I dont think so

@night shell

[night shell]

your material on the walls is set to render both faces

set it to render the front face only

@timber lichen

[timber lichen]

it disappears when I do that

[night shell]

show me

[night shell]

yep then that makes a ton of sense

the meshes are modeled incorrectly

[timber lichen]

I knew it...

[night shell]

the normals are wrong

so correct them in a modeling package that you have which was maya if I recall

when the meshes are corrected

the walls shouldn't dissapear now

atleast not unless you go onto the other side of it

and if you want to still see a wall even on the other side of it

then the wall needs to have a thickness to it

wall meshes can NOT be one sided if the intent is to have a wall that can be seen from both sides

that will lead to the many many issues that you've been running into

[ember tide]

How can i avoid this? Could this effect only be achieved by lowering intensity of the light gradually?

[arctic isle]

You can also animate the color of the Light to go darker and darker. I wouldn't recommend having the Light on if it's not supposed to be lighting anything

[chilly kettle]

Well, i think that the people who are asking what lightmaps are, do not prepare their UV channels for this ^^

[dense mural]

I'm making my game using modular building pieces from Blender, where I line up the edges perfectly. My problem is that directional light seeps through the edges, because they are lined up perfectly. Is there a way to prevent this from happening?

I've tried scaling up my wall pieces so they overlap and this still happens

changing the bias to 0 somewhat fixes the problem, but there are still areas where the light appears and it shouldn't

[night shell]

think your running into a problem on why you should avoid making enviorments with modular meshes. it typically doesn't play well with how realtime rendering works

[night shell]

can you provide some visual examples so we can see whats going on and help you to fix it?

[dense mural]

How else would you recommend doing it? I'm reusing a lot of assets so doing it in a non-modular way seems very tedious

[dense mural]

I'm going to be away from my pc for a little while but I'll send some pictures in a few hours

[night shell]

during asset creation building from modular assets is a fine idea, but when it comes to integrating it into an actual game enviorment its best to combine all of those meshes properly in your modeling package before bringing it in to a game enviorment

[dense mural]

So you would recommend using modular assets within blender but then to make an entire room for example I should combine all the meshes and then export it for Unity?

[night shell]

yes

<@&502884371011731486> @worn snow another bot

now its just a suggestion

you don't have to abide by it if you don't want to but generally form my experience when it comes to building enviorments from many modular meshes. You can run into alot of issues when it comes to light leaking, and especially when lightmapping some of those issues multiply and introduce other problems like random dark spots at intersection points or whatnot and more

[dense mural]

Gotcha. My original plan was to put all the modular pieces together to make a room, and then make that room a prefab, and then connect all the rooms of my house together. If I made a single FBX file for each room, this would still cause light bleed when I combine them though, right? So wouldn't I need to make my entire house a single file?

[night shell]

even if its a single FBX file there can still be issues

the meshes have to actually be combined

and connected

I'll try my best to explain it since its tough

[dense mural]

Yeah I think I get what you mean, like I'd actually be combining all the walls and floors and ceilings into a single correctly combined mesh in blender

[night shell]

yes basically

it also helps alot with optimization

[dense mural]

But that would mean my entire house would need to be correctly combined in blender, so I'd just have one massive file for my whole house right? My entire game takes place in this house, so wouldn't this cause problems either with optimization or workflow?

I've heard people say that I can make an invisible cage that blocks shadows into my house, but that seems like a pain in the ass and I'd rather just let the pieces do this shadow blocking if it can

That would require me to make cutouts and stuff for windows too, so again, this is a last resort

[night shell]

I would combine the mesh for each single room though

and segment the house by rooms

[night shell]

this is a viable way to do it and sometimes is the right way to do it

I'll provide some visuals examples to help explain

[deft fiber]

It's what I would do
One smooth shaded shadows-only cube that hangs just behind each edge where the mesh is meant to connect to the next
I don't see how that's a lot of extra effort
You'd naturally include them in prefabs or the fbx itself instead of adding them to every seam manually

[dense mural]

Yeah but then it would create this issue every time I combine the rooms, sure, now it won't be as big of an issue because it's only where rooms meet and not on each wall of each room, but I'll still have the problem if I move them against each other

[night shell]

putting together some visual examples real quick to illustrate the drawbacks

[deft fiber]

I think modular meshes in engine are totally fine, as long as you watch out for the specific drawbacks

[night shell]

they are and I was a bit hesitant because often times we've seen people use them and run into lighting issues and wonder why they are getting those issues

[dense mural]

So you would make a cube that covers each seam? When I get back to my pc I can try to recreate what I think you mean

[night shell]

and most of the time it stems from the enviorment being built from many different little peices that aren't perfectly aligned that would cuase those issues

[dense mural]

Well that's not my case, my pieces are perfectly aligned and I've tried also scaling them a little so they overlap and I still have the same issue

[night shell]

heres an example I quickly setup

a room modeled from cubes (that are perfectly aligned)

emulating an enviorment that is modeled from many different peices

you can see the issues that prop up especially when I bake it

if your using realtime lighting, because of its inprecision usually it isn't too much of a problem but it still comes with its issues

looks fine in here, except notice here

random little lines at intersection points

from the realtime shadows