archived-lighting

[tired siren]

Since the terrain is static.

Directional lights aren't moving.

[hot path]

yeah they are

i have a daynight cycle

[tired siren]

Why does your directional light move?

I assume you don't use the "sun source" in the skybox than

Open your lighting tab, under windows, and show me your settings.

[tired siren]

Yeah that.

That one can move, and still calculates overall lighting at runtime. Meanwhile two other directional lights will 'simulate' ambient lighting.

[hot path]

night tho

[tired siren]

Disable the lights in a script.

[hot path]

baked lights dont disable well

afaik

[tired siren]

Baked lights are pre calculated data.

[hot path]

yes which is calculated as if the lights exist

[tired siren]

The information is on the terrain not the lights.

[hot path]

yes

[tired siren]

You'll have real-time light and and baked lightmaps

Thats how you skirt performance issues, it calls pre calculated data. Vs computing it during runtime.

[hot path]

yes but, if you bake the light, afaik it cant be disabled

[tired siren]

Youre not baking lights though, your baking light values on a terrain. All the light does is hit a specific spot and renders accordingly.

If no light hits it, no lighting calculations.

[hot path]

yes i know thats not the problem though

[deft fiber]

Lightmaps cannot be changed at runtime (unless you specifically swap or modify them) even when lighting conditions change, so there would be a mismatch between lightmaps and lighting conditions when modifying a light that was included in the baked lightmapping

[hot path]

ok yeah thats what i was saying

i wasnt 100% sure but

i saw a demo in a video when i was researching baked lights

[deft fiber]

I recall last time you were using realtime lightmaps though, right?

[tired siren]

You still have real-time lightmaps.

[hot path]

yes, the preferred solution though, is just to use ambient lighting

i THINK

[hot path]

but that baked data is still there

and it was baked when the light was active

[tired siren]

Baked lightmaps only apply to static objects. Real-time lightmaps aren't the same.

[hot path]

the problem here being that ambient light wont affect my terrain

[tired siren]

Well they are, and aren't. I'm sorry to confuse us both 😔

Admittedly Im curious about the answer too.

[deft fiber]

If you don't want either baked or realtime lightmaps, you'd clear the baked light cache to ensure they aren't overriding the terrain's lighting

[tired siren]

Because my question was somewhat similar. Is it even worth baking lightmaps when only the terrain is static.

[hot path]

yeah

this is the issue though

my trees get ambient lighting

my terrain does not

[deft fiber]

Maybe if the terrain is very bumpy you could get shadowing in the valleys
But when baking you'd usually want to leverage it to the fullest and include more meshes than just the terrain into it

[deft fiber]

Maybe something's wrong with the terrain rather than the lighting

[tired siren]

Two levels in a valley, and one under water. Both benefit from the shadows. They're just massive, and so far my baking has taken 2 days. Currently preprocessing the last level. Was wondering if it'll even be worth it in the end, since profiler didn't show much in the way of lighting affecting performance.

It holds steady above 30-40 fps. Trying to squeeze out every frame.

[deft fiber]

When optimizing you'd always measure the effectiveness

[tired siren]

Effectiveness in terms of? How it looks, or how much frame loss from runtime calc?

[deft fiber]

Both really
You'll only want to do optimizations that are worth doing

[tired siren]

Work vs reward, yes.

They're massive levels, with really only one light.

[deft fiber]

There's practically a whole field of science for optimizing huge levels which I'm not super familiar with

But baking can be ineffecient for very large areas since your resolution will often be spread across a lot of empty space

[tired siren]

I would have preferred the entire scene be static for baked lighting but the outline shaders dont like it.

Thats why I was wondering if this is even worth the work. The only benefit I can perceive is shadowing on the terrain.

[tired siren]

I should have asked before I started. Thanks for the tips

[deft fiber]

From what I know all very large game spaces rely on different kinds of LOD systems

Sometimes that means splitting the world into cells, or something like streaming virtual textures

[tired siren]

And billboards, yes.

I do use a lot of LOD on things like trees, and nature related stuff.

Never thought of virtual textures.

For some context, its a game like Katamri Damacy but slightly more realistic but still low poly cartoony

[deft fiber]

Unity's Terrain I think has some kind of dynamic LOD for the geometry, but not for lightmaps or textures

[tired siren]

I didn't use their tree tool, I haven't figured that out yet.

The lightmaps probably aren't worth it 😕

[deft fiber]

I mean the terrain geometry's LOD, but that's getting a bit off topic

[night shell]

there are ways to split up your existing unity terrain

[deft fiber]

Having one all-encompassing lightmap sounds very inefficient, both for resolution and filesize

[night shell]

and you could write an LOD system to where you only load in the needed terrain data

its not built in sadly

[deft fiber]

Realtime lighting benefits from cascades so you can automatically render sharper shadowmaps close up where they're needed

[tired siren]

Thats what I'm hoping for, you start super tiny, the size of a cat. Then grow to the size of a 4 story apartment building if not bigger.

So the range of what is rendering is pretty wide.

Especially under water.

[deft fiber]

Realtime shadow distance can be adjusted so visually the shadow resolution stays the same, unlike lightmaps which are limited to mesh scale

[hot path]

do i have to manually account for ambient lighting? it seems like the shader is automatically accounting for regular lighting, this is a shader graph custom shader btw

maybe that is the issue

[tired siren]

So what you're saying is the default shadow resolution would be more effective than a lightmap?

[hot path]

no we cant, without extra information

[deft fiber]

A "Lit" Shader Graph does calculate in ambient lighting, an unlit shader with your own lighting nodes would not unless also included

[deft fiber]

In many cases I think it would, and give you more control overall in changing environments but

[hot path]

hm. thats what im using, so not sure why its not working

[tired siren]

The environments are static. Nothing changes or moves. Just the FOV on the player.

Until you collide with them, they will shrink in scale and disable.

[deft fiber]

Iirc that suggests they're missing a Diffusion Profile for subsurface scattering

[deft fiber]

What it depends on is mostly just how much you want to leverage the benefits of baked lighting, like bounces or cheap rendering, and how much you want to avoid realtime lighting

If you don't have a super compelling reason to avoid realtime or the performance cost isn't significant, I'd probably go with realtime because of the changing scale

You'll just need to adjust the shadow distance and cascades when the player resizes

[tired siren]

That is extremely helpful knowledge. Thank you for everything!

[hot path]

oh yeah thats another thing with HDRP right

you need lots of extra knowledge to use it

I tried opening an HDRP demo and there were so many settings related to HDRP

[deft fiber]

Go forth, I'll gladly hear how my mostly untested theories work in practice

[deft fiber]

One of the many things indeed
Could also be something I haven't even learned about

[tired siren]

I won't directly apply your solutions but they will direct me to the appropriate answers for my game. As you said it depends, and in this case it probably was a waste of time to bake. I'll show you the profile when its done 🤣

[dreamy hawk]

Can anyone help me fix 2D lighting issues Im having been at this for 2 hours and still dont know why its not workin dm me

[dreamy hawk]

AHA nvm figured it out my light wasnt 2D

[paper maple]

I feel like it is safe to put it here, so I have gotten this to work in the way I want it so far, but the line render is not bright enough.
i have added a emission to it, but I dont know how to make it anymore brighter, to show off as a really laser, the thing you would normally see in a night club

Never mind I have worked it out

[radiant kettle]

Hey so I have this hallway composed of 5 quads, with Two Sided shadows. Only thing is light seeps along the edges, how should I go about this?

The sizes and positions should match pretty much exactly

I'm starting to think I might just fake it with a shadow only object above or something

[arctic isle]

Quads are not appropriate for this, please use cubes or make a mesh in eg Blender for the corridor

[stark temple]

if you don't have a reflection probe in the scene and you're not using a form of raymarching (SSR) or ray tracing, then your materials will only reflect the skybox

[prime ruin]

I do have and those are the settings

Did i do something wrong

[stark temple]

No but reflections will not be accurate with reflection probes. The best you can do it add multiple. You should consider adding screen-space reflections to the scene if you have access to them

[prime ruin]

sadly no

[radiant kettle]

It's procedurally generated, so it would have to be an asset similar to a quad possibly?

Also do you mean using cubes as walls? That shouldn't be too hard to do on my end if you think it could make sense for something like that

I thought quads were good for performance but I don't know much about rendering and such

[prime wharf]

I made a model in blender and when I imported it I baked the lighting and some faces didnt get affected by the lights. I forgot to enable generate lightmap uvs, I enable it and then the uvs are f----- up. how could I fix that?

[merry abyss]

Is it possible in Unity to make shadows cast by an object be semi-transparent? As in not the same full shadow dark that by default all meshes cast?

visual example of what I mean

[radiant kettle]

There's probably better ways of doing this but you can change shadow color, and probably opacity too in the Lighting Settings. So you could use different lights that cast different shadows for objects on different layers.

[upper fable]

not really, and having multiple lights cast shadows for specific object is very inefficient

[merry abyss]

how would you suggest getting some shadows less dark than others?

[upper fable]

Not easily atleast. Id just give up on that, no one will notice the difference anyway. The way shadow casting works, theres not really any tenchique to do that other than using multiple shadow maps which is far from optimal. On some specific cases you could be able to fake semi-transparent shadows with decals but other than that I dont know

[tight moss]

does anyone else find they have to resort to weirdly low intensities on point lights to get spooky indoor lighting?

[rapid palm]

I keep getting an overlapping UV error, any ideas on how to deal with that?

[steep egret]

i need help with this glitch!

i do not know how to fix it

[limber delta]

Sometimes, yes. I think it depends a lot on the color of the light

[deft fiber]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProgressiveLightmapper-UVOverlap.html
Make sure the meshes have valid lightmap UVs for starters

[deft fiber]

What glitch

[deft fiber]

"Spooky" is rather subjective and situational
If low light intensities work best, I don't think it's weird to have them
How intensity corresponds to brightness is dependent on your project's color space, camera's dynamic range and light attenuation

[median kindle]

Anyone able to help me, I have a 2d tilemap in a 3d scene but it does not seem to be receiving any lighting. Any suggestions?

Objects do receive lighting as seen in the image.

[quick saddle]

Dont use a tilemap
Use terrain tools

[median kindle]

But do the terrain tools allow me to have a grid and tile pallette?

[deft fiber]

Nope

Sprites can receive lighting but they need to be using a 3D lit shader

[median kindle]

I see so I need to switch them to a 3D shader

Fixed thanks

[gritty fox]

is that not this?

this is for point lights

[tight moss]

thanks. after a night of experimentation im starting to realize that games like RE7 and P.T. use very little GI bounce

if you want lights to be super bright but it to be dark like 5 feet away just tweaking intensities and range isn't going to cut it if you have 5 GI bounces

im targeting quest so can't using any color grading/tonemapping so i basically have to nail it with the bake

[deft fiber]

Both of them are 100% dynamic lighting as far as I can tell

[tight moss]

yeah i would imagine so. still, trying to get similar results with a bake is tough

[forest rose]

Got a question, should I leave the first room as it is or have it lit up like this room?

[deft fiber]

Unlike the second image, the light bounces make sense in the first one

[forest rose]

I have loads more lights in the second image and I spread it across the room, I did nothing different except add more lights

Plus I made changes for the main room that I was having difficulty getting lighting done for, I removed the skylight and added more stage lights

[forest rose]

I probably should have added that leading to the room is a corridor that exposes light from the outside as well

[deft fiber]

It certainly doesn't look like more light sources so I'm afraid your lighting settings may still be messed up

[forest rose]

Would you have any spare time to have a look at the settings then? I can push latest changes

[deft fiber]

I could take a peek at it

[forest rose]

https://github.com/ckusellagussin/Website_Showcase
Here you go

[languid cove]

& @upper fable : There is a hacky way : use alpha cutoff to dither the object in the shadowmap.
IIRC that's how it's done in the built-in pipeline.
It's limited to something like 8 or 16 levels of transparency on the shadow.
The shadow softening does the rest to hide the dithering effect.

[untold rain]

How to replicate this sort of lighting seen in Psychonauts? It darker in some areas and lighter in others. Is there a way to make a Unity directional light but then designate certain zones to be a bit darker?

Psychonauts in general seemed to have some interesting lighting, I guess it would be my first reference I would try to replicate in my Unity game.

https://youtu.be/H1QOzkcw5tY?t=4885

[upper fable]

I dont think shadow strength uses dithering in birp, I may be wrong tho. I think I have tried that and dithered shadows looked quite noisy and apparent that they were using dithering. Shadow softening isnt that smooth in birp. Could be worth a try tho

[deft fiber]

GitHub - ckusellagussin/Website_Showcase...

[whole bramble]

hey folks

is there any difference between the quality of progressive CPU and progressive GPU lightmapping????

i know progressive GPU is faster

but...is the lightmap quality same in case of these both?

[arctic isle]

nope, same image quality

it's not guaranteed to be identical, but there shouldn't be any significant differences

[whole bramble]

thats a very good news then, u're sure?^^

[arctic isle]

yes 🙂

[whole bramble]

thanks a lot buddy

[devout ore]

Hi! Anyone know why this could be happening? if I load the main scene as additive it looks darker, I even deactivate the directional light and it gets even darker (as it should). But when I unload the other scene I get this weird lightning where it looks fully illuminated even though all lights are off

Just figured it out. It was the Enviroment lightning settings

[severe yarrow]

Question:
Im getting quite annoyed with the light baking.
I need to see if the textures look good enough, but the baking takes a lifetime and a half to bake.
What might be the problem?
I only have 1 object thats 350 triss in the scene, 1 directional light that is set to baked, and one skybox added to the Environment settings.
I reset all the settings on everything, cleared the baked data.
Im using the medium URP quality and removed all the shadows.
But when i press the "Generate lighting" button, it starts adding 1 minute each second that goes. i removed every realtime light, just focusing on the baked lights.
Im on a laptop, but its a high tier gaming laptop, RTX 2080. And yes im using the GPU (progressive)
Any tips on what i can do speed up the baking?

[forest rose]

Lower resolution light maps, turn off global environment bake and get an actual desktop computer with better hardware

Plus larger levels and more assets mean longer load times too

[night shell]

generally @forest rose is right but there are also alot of other things that can be applied to drastically reduce your baking times @severe yarrow

if you show us the scene your trying to bake and the settings your using for it we can help you dial them in and speed things up quite a bit

high sample counts and tons of bounces can increase your bake times quite a bit

if the number keeps climbing also that is most likely a sign of something else going on

there are times where the ETA can be inaccurate and for some reason keeps climbing because something else is being done (if your lucky the ETA then resets and it actually then starts to bake your scene with the proper ETA given)

[severe yarrow]

Ill get some screenshots and maybe a vid tomorrow. Bed time now. Thanx anyway for now.

[main wolf]

scale down map and all lights range by something (0.1 to 0.25 should do) then bake
when baking done, revert the scale and light range
not working with lightprobes (and reflection probes too maybe) unfortunately

[limber delta]

Hello! I'm using the Baked Lit shader in my URP project and since changing to that shader, whenever I toggle the scene lights off the lighting stays the same. In my case almost all scenes are quite dark (horror game) which means I can't really see when placing items and so on.

Is there a way for me to activate some kind of default ambient lighting for the whole scene? I could use the wireframe view but that isn't as handy I think.

Unity 2021.3.19f1

Thanks

[arctic isle]

Did you try toggling the lighting off from the toggle at the top of the scene view?

[limber delta]

Yes! This is what doesn't have an effect anymore

And it's after I've started using the Baked Lit shader. The meshes that use that shader are not affected by that setting/toggle

[arctic isle]

I remember someone internally running into this but we couldn't reproduce the issue. It sounds like a bug :/

[limber delta]

Ah I see. That's too bad. There is another annoying one as well in v 2021.3.19f1

My box colliders won't show most of the time. I have to click the BoxCollider box in the visibility menu a few times and then they show up.

[arctic isle]

Those may be separate issues if at all

[limber delta]

Yeah, Too bad about the lighting but I guess I can use the wireframe mode. Luckily most scenes are already designed 😅 Thank you for the help!

[delicate mountain]

HDRP is pretty sexy and the adaptive volumes are super nice!

[timber lichen]

hi, when I click on my mesh, the inspector doesnt have a "Generate lightmap UVs" button, there are just details. What should I do?

[deft fiber]

Can you show a screenshot of the inspector at that state

[timber lichen]

yes

as an example

[deft fiber]

These are not mesh asset's import settings, this is the mesh data itself

[timber lichen]

what can I do?

[deft fiber]

The asset should look something like this in your project window
Select the parent asset instead of the mesh data within it

[timber lichen]

I cant make lightmaps, the meshes are always black

[timber lichen]

I dont think I have any of these parent assets

or maybe I dont get what do you mean by that

[deft fiber]

Where did your door mesh come from?

And where does it exist in your project file structure

[pallid bear]

Ok so by experimenting I realized that small reflection probes are more accurate than big ones. A small pond shouldn't reflect a 20 meter volume in its entirety.

I have a swampy environment with lots of puddles and ponds so should I just use a billion reflection probes? Also, I notice that reflections are wildly off at the far edge of my lake. Is that because it's using the nearest reflection probe which is at the center of the map?

Should the entire map then be overlapped with reflection probes? Is there a case where I would use big probes like maybe the big lake?

Another thing is reflection probes seem to ignore terrain grass (detail meshes). Is there any setting where I can include them? Or do I need to place that specific grass as a game object?

I am specifically talking about cattails near and in ponds and it looks weird if they are not reflected in the pond itself.

Thank you.

[deft fiber]

Reflection probes are terribly inefficient and inaccurate for extensive mirror surfaces like water, and for reflecting any detail right on top of the reflective surface
You would likely want to look into "planar" reflection probes and screen space reflections, if those are available to you

[desert olive]

can i have a filler light to fill the shadows just like skylight in unreal ?

in unity

but real time one

[deft fiber]

HDRP supports realtime area lights
It's closest to Unreal's render pipeline in general

[desert olive]

well skylight is like ambient light but for shadow

area light wont fit that purpose

[bright pumice]

Has anyone ran into / resolved this issue where mesh renderer's lose their reference to their lightmap? https://forum.unity.com/threads/mesh-renderer-losing-reference-to-lightmap.1111360/

[deft fiber]

I guess I'm not familiar enough with this "sky light" concept

It seems to be some kind of fancy way to use reflection probes as more accurate light probes

[pallid bear]

They're not unfortunately, I'm using URP. I saw some planar reflections for URP on github, I would have to look into those

but most of them are for deferred rendering which won't work for me

[deft fiber]

I believe Unity's Boat Attack URP demo includes a planar reflection probe implementation which could be used

[pallid bear]

Oh that would be great if true

I will check it out

but what do you mean exactly by probe?

it's not a standard reflection probe, right? Cause that would just be a realtime probe

[deft fiber]

No, a planar reflection probe is a second camera that renders what's reflected from a planar surface, and the image is then applied as specularity like any reflection

It's not much like what you would think of as "probe"

[pallid bear]

yeah ok that makes more sense

but then I don't need reflection probes for normal terrain. Or can I just use the planar reflection for actual water parts? The idea there is optimization

[deft fiber]

It's more expensive than the usual realtime reflection probe, I believe, but just one such probe should be usable for any reflective surface that resides at the same height and faces upwards

[pallid bear]

good

I will definitely look into that

to give you more context

This is an example of the scene

You can see the cattails are invisible in the reflection and the rest is innacurate. Maybe I'm even using the probes incorrectly

but I will see how planar reflection works

''The planar reflections in Boat Attack do need to have a more in-depth guide to using them, especially using them in isolation, right now they are fairly embedded in the project making it hard to re-use in other projects. There are plans to document this and also work on the code to make it more useful rather than just a demo piece.''

This is a quote by a unity dev...so that won't work I guess

[deft fiber]

Ah, that sucks

You're not practically going to get good reflections with just the traditional probes in that kind of situation I think

Even with box projection you'll run into a lot of parallax errors

But if you make the water turbulent and translucent enough, that might hide the issues to an acceptable degree

[pallid bear]

sure but it doesn't make sense for the ponds to be turbulent

I have little movement but I think even that might be much

there are some solution on github but idk, I found those hard to get to work

I guess I might have to accept reality but at least I will place the cattails as game objects so that they are included in the water reflection

I mean, in the reflection probe

[pallid bear]

Ok I'm stupid, I didn't use box projection...that makes it 50000% better

now it looks fine actually

[pallid bear]

Turns out I don't understand at all...my reflection probes don't work unless I make the bounding box a specific size...then if I do, another reflection will stop working

I just don't get it

I couldn't understand this less...and this ruined another probe when it started working

[copper ocean]

Quick question, do you guys ever use a skybox when designing a game that takes place in a dungeon?
if so, whats the most pleasing skybox?

[deft fiber]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AdvancedRefProbe.html
Box projected reflection probe's cubemap is drawn on the probe bounds
I don't see what the "ruined probes" are in this case

[pallid bear]

ok I will show you

[pallid bear]

https://streamable.com/vp0cco

[pallid bear]

Here...you can see the first pond has working reflections, the second one doesn't. As soon as I enlarge the bounding box, you can see when the switch happens when it starts working. Then the first pond stops having working reflections
This isn't specific to these two reflection probes, it happens with every one and I can't understand why

[hot beacon]

i mean if you want to use SSR in URP you can use plug-in KMIRROR from github

that being said, why did unity didnt implement it for URP

[pallid bear]

I would actually be fine with reflection probes if they worked correctly...se above video

[hot beacon]

damn,that's look good, last time i use reflection prob it didnt reflec correctly so i just give up, probably i need to re-learn about this

[pallid bear]

Yes it definitely looks acceptable but do you see what's happening? It's like a bug or somehting

[hot beacon]

i am not quite sure, but probably your box projection "collide" with each other? idk tho i am never use more than 1 reflection prob

[pallid bear]

ok I found out when I increase importance, the probe with higher importance will work...does that mean only 1 probe can work at a time? Wtf unity?

[pallid bear]

OK I think I figured it out. I think 2 probes work ON THE SAME OBJECT and my water block is one game object. So I need to split water blocks into multiple objects. I think this is it. Will test later.

Thank you for reading my monologue.

[serene elbow]

Any tips on how to make this lighting better? URP

[stuck sail]

I believe it all depends on the art style you're going for, are you trying to make it look realistic or stylized?

[serene elbow]

Kinda realistic xD

[stuck sail]

No worries, an easy way to make it a bit more realistic is to turn down the bloom haha, it's washing out the scene quite a bit. You can tweak the threshold instead of the intensity. That way the bright parts are bright, but not washing out the darker parts of the scene. Also, you could add an exposure post processing effect, modify to fit what you believe to as looking real

Also, is your directional light lined up to the sun location in the skybox?

[serene elbow]

Yup I already lowered the bloom after I took the screenshot of the one I uploaded here xD

[serene elbow]

Hmm let me check

Not sure

[stuck sail]

Haha awesome!

[serene elbow]

Yup it wasn't! Haha

[stuck sail]

If you double click the item in the Hierarchy, then hold alt + left click drag, it'll allow you to orbit the object. Then use the rotate tool to match it exactly 😎

[serene elbow]

Whaaat

I did not know that

Thats actually really nice

Thank you!

Yup I think it looks more balanced now!

The first one is the new screenshot

[stuck sail]

WHOA, big improvements since the last screen shot! Great work

[serene elbow]

Thank you so much!

[stuck sail]

Is the water utilizing subsurface scattering?

[serene elbow]

Yup it is but I think it's disabled in the screenshot above

[stuck sail]

It looks as if it's working, unless my eyes are deceiving me haha. Is that a custom asset or the default Unity water now for URP?

[serene elbow]

URP now has a default water 😶 ?

What version?

This is the KWS Water System xD

[stuck sail]

I don't believe to be that advanced! KWS Water, ah okay. That makes more sense! I haven't worked with URP for a while so I had been thinking, whoa they updated that quick 😂

[serene elbow]

Oh GOOD then xD I know about HDRP having its own Water System but didnt hear about the URP pipeline xD

Wanted to use HDRP first for this project but with an empty scene I have around 200 fps xD So I just choose the URP

[stuck sail]

That's what I am currently working with (HDRP WaterSystem) and I can't figure out how to get my transparent materials to render while looking through the water, very odd issue!

[stuck sail]

URP is a great render pipeline. Great for Mobile, PC, and console games! Also, it is a bit easier to use, having less settings that can dramatically degrade the performance of a game like HDRP.

[serene elbow]

Uhh wish I could help but haven't used the default water yet xD

[serene elbow]

Yupp URP is really great, If I was doing only like a high-end pc game or like a PS5 game yup HDRP is great but for like a middle-end pc + maybe VR in the future I think URP is a better option

[stuck sail]

That seems to be the norm, I haven't worked with it till the past week! It looks great, but this one issue is really stalling my development process. Eventually I will figure it out and I'll wonder how it took me so long 😅

[stuck sail]

That is the exact reason why I have switched to HDRP for a project. My other project Pixel Strike 3D utilizes URP and is on PC, Mobile, and soon other platforms. It proves URP is great for a game that can be graphically beautiful, but also capable to scale itself down for weaker hardware 🙂

[severe yarrow]

Question: How do i turn off the Precomputed Realtime GI?

[stuck sail]

In the lighting panel!

[severe yarrow]

yes, but where? dont see a tab or a function where it says just those words

[stuck sail]

The label for the setting will be "Realtime Global Illumination. Should be able to toggle it off

[serene elbow]

YOU DID THE Pixel Strike 3D? I ACTUALLY SAW THAT GAME Is it on Google Play Store?

[stuck sail]

Sure did! Also, it sure is. All made with URP too, so it proves it's a great pipeline for many platforms 🙂

[severe yarrow]

thanx.

[serene elbow]

A great game!

[stuck sail]

No problem! 👍

[stuck sail]

Thank you, I really appreciate that!

[serene elbow]

No problem!

[serene elbow]

I'm currently doing my first project that I want to release on Steam but I have a lot of experience in Unity just doing small personal games xD

[severe yarrow]

im having a problem with a material not wanting to take on any light from the bake. thought doing the stages for static stuff would work, but im out of ideas at this point. need help.
the material will not take on any light from either a point light set to bake or an area light, everything around it lits up. but not that.
what could be the problem? the object has the same material values as the other lit stuff.

[stuck sail]

That is exactly how I started! I wish you well on your journey to release 🙂

[serene elbow]

Thank you so much! 😄

[stuck sail]

Click on the gameobject, and check this box

[severe yarrow]

could it be that it has an overlapping UV that is stopping its surface from being hit by light? cus it has an overlapping UV.

[stuck sail]

Is it an imported 3D model?

[severe yarrow]

made by me.

so yes. from maya

and it has the create lightmap UV created

[severe yarrow]

that is already checked

[stuck sail]

Click on the 3D model in the project view, then in the inspector check this box, now rebake the lighting

[severe yarrow]

already done.

[stuck sail]

Hmm, can you show me the inspector for the material of the object?

[severe yarrow]

i tried using lightprobes. but no difference

its not reflecting any light at all.

[stuck sail]

Disable emission on the material, see if the lighting is now effecting the object. If it is, it's your emission map not completely blacking out the non-emissive parts.

[severe yarrow]

ok. ill try that. might it also be the emissive map overriding the light parametars?

baking again

kinda looks the same without the emissive turned out

its like its reflecting the bounce of the walls, but not directly from the light source.

[stuck sail]

Yeah that is weird. I will open a Unity Project and try to replicate this issue, should take less then 10 minutes.

[severe yarrow]

awesome. ill continue doing my CSI on this 🙂

kinda same problem here on this thread:https://forum.unity.com/threads/some-surfaces-not-reflecting-light.891901/

[stuck sail]

OH, remove your Metallic Map and then drag it all the way down. Does that fix it?

[severe yarrow]

maybe a reflection probe is needed?

[severe yarrow]

ill give it a try

[stuck sail]

You won't need to rebake

[severe yarrow]

SH*T. well now there is light. omfg

[stuck sail]

AWESOME! Okay, so open your metallic map in Photoshop; image -> Adjustments -> invert

[severe yarrow]

wow. could it really be that simple?

if so, you are a life saver.

[stuck sail]

Let me know! If it does work as planned, I'll be happy 😂

[severe yarrow]

hehe. should i bake?

[stuck sail]

You shouldn't need to bake again, it should work as intended

[severe yarrow]

well, i added the inverted metalic map, and its still shining as before, the latest pic i showed. but i need to lower the light and see what happend below the light 🙂

give me 2 mins

the metallic map is super shiny in substance painter, why is unity using an inverted metallic map for metallic surfaces? this is insane. have to do this for all metallic surfaces then.

it is taking on the light now. but the reflective shiny surface is kinda gone. this is silly 🙂

some setting is inverted in the URP.

[stuck sail]

It's not so much that, but the inversion of the metallic map was to see if the map was made for metallic map. I think you should invert it back and plug it into smoothness and leave metallic map to none. See if that gives the desired result 🤔

[severe yarrow]

im on it.

[severe yarrow]

cant really plug anything in the smoothness slot, doesnt have any slot to add anything into. just the metallic

[stuck sail]

Have to remove the metallic map first before you can put something in the smoothness map

OOH WAIT

[severe yarrow]

🙂

[stuck sail]

Put the metallic map back in, but change source from metallic alpha to Albedo Alpha. See if Substance wants that for their metallic maps

[severe yarrow]

trying a new bake to see what happends.

no difference

[stuck sail]

It shouldn't need a new bake when changing material settings, but this is a very odd issue. I am confused as to why substance painter's metallic map wasn't working from the beginning. The inversion of it's map was to see if the map it made was correct. Change your material back to how you had it, can you send me the metallic map so I can look at it's color channels in Photoshop?

[severe yarrow]

ok

[stuck sail]

Replace it with that, does it work better?

[severe yarrow]

looks like this in SP

[stuck sail]

Yeah, seems to be a fairly common issue with Substance Painter's Metallic Maps to Unity

[severe yarrow]

looks better, but still not reflective at all. but an improvement. what did you tweak?

[stuck sail]

I added a black layer to the image, then flattened it. I am so confused, let me open a new project and I'll use the metallic map and see if I can get a material setup with it.

[severe yarrow]

haha, kinda what i feel 🙂

[severe yarrow]

appreciate it

[slow owl]

when i'm Baking my Light, my GPU usage only spikes to 22%, is there a way to let unity utilize my card more is it capped?

[severe yarrow]

did you tick this? @slow owl

[slow owl]

yep

[stuck sail]

Found the solution 😅 Add a reflection probe to the scene and in the inspector on it, click bake. The material show now be looking proper

[severe yarrow]

how long does your baking take? is that the problem?

[severe yarrow]

ahhhh. i did add an reflectyion probe, but i had to bump up the intensity a bunch. super thankful

[slow owl]

It doesn't take unbearably long... but i was wondering if its possible to speed up since the usage is so low. If i can't let unity utilize it more, then thats no biggie!

[stuck sail]

Oooou pretty!

[severe yarrow]

be glad it doesnt utilize it more. then you have a good light bake setting, or not enough stuff to bake. your gpu might just use as much as it needs.

[stuck sail]

Sadly I don't think it's possible. However, if light baking does take long, setup a light setting asset for "Release" and one for "Preview"

[slow owl]

oke! thanks!

[severe yarrow]

might have to look into that one. sounds interesting

[slow owl]

Why do these weird artefacts happen and how do i fix that?

[stuck sail]

Click on your imported model in the project panel, then tick "Generate Lightmap UVs" in the inspector. Rebake the lighting and it should be fixed 👍

[slow owl]

already have that turned on!

[stuck sail]

May be an issue with the light mapper being impacted by your models normals. Try the Enlighten mapper depending on your Unity version.

[slow owl]

2021.3.5

[stuck sail]

The Enlighten light mapper will be deprecated, but try it and see if the lighting then looks normal.

[slow owl]

ok

[worthy trail]

is there a way to allow more than 8 lights on a mesh with forward lighting on urp

[stuck sail]

Don't believe so, may have to switch to Deferred

[worthy trail]

thing is

i have to use an overlay camera

which i cant use in deferred

[worthy trail]

no way its you im making a pixel shooter too

lol

nice to see the vulcron guys here

[stuck sail]

Hi Squidy, that's awesome! 😎

[slow owl]

that fixed it, but now all the other objects look way worse!

there's also no emission!

[stuck sail]

Okay, now that you've tested that, switch back to progressive lightmapper. The mesh that has lighting issues may need to be solidified.

[slow owl]

that means?

[stuck sail]

Are you using Blender for making your models?

[slow owl]

I don't make them. My Collegue does!

[serene elbow]

@stuck sail I think it looks a lot better now! Just have no idea how would I lower the water reflection brightness a little bit down xD

[stuck sail]

Now the paths for the progressive lightmapper have to bounce of on any direction at this mesh.

[slow owl]

what's the name of the modifyer?

[stuck sail]

"Solidify" - Under the generate section

[serene elbow]

Solidify, something like that

[slow owl]

got it!

[stuck sail]

That looks great! 🌊

[serene elbow]

Thank you!

[stuck sail]

A great way to minimize the white shine on it, turn the shine all the way up. It may limit it more to just the peaks of the waves, I may be wrong though!

[serene elbow]

I can disable "Reflect Sunlight"

And then it looks like this

[stuck sail]

imo, that actually looks better! Though, it comes down to your opinion as it's your project 🙂

[serene elbow]

It does look a lot better maybe I'll change the water color a bit!

Thanks!

[stuck sail]

You're quite welcome!

[slow owl]

ok, i told him to try that!

[stuck sail]

More than 8 lights may impact performance, just remember that 🤔

[stuck sail]

Awesome, hopefully that fixes the lighting issues (It should, I have delt with that on Pixel Strike's older maps and that solved it).

[slow owl]

[worthy trail]

ok. yeah I want to display more than 8 lights at a time

[stuck sail]

Is it on a model that will be moving in the scene?

[worthy trail]

wow no gifs

[worthy trail]

no

the mesh is terrain

[stuck sail]

Hmm, yeah I don't know how you'd get around the light limitation without switching to deffered

[worthy trail]

tough

someone told me about forward+ in unity 2022

[stuck sail]

You could definitely try that. Didn't even know that was available! I will create a test project in that version and let you know

[worthy trail]

oh wow thank you

also by the way

[stuck sail]

No problem! The project is generating as we speak, I should have your answer in a matter of minutes

[worthy trail]

is there any chance you would know how to make materials in game

like have a editor where people can make custom gun skins or things like that

im stumped on it

[stuck sail]

Works! Forward+ is your answer

[worthy trail]

THANK YOU

[stuck sail]

Haha that is something that is quite in-depth. It would be good to learn the basics of the engine before diving into something so advanced. That will allow you to know how to go about making something of that scale

[worthy trail]

i dont do all the code for my game. I do everything but the code lol

my team members take care of the code and networking

anyways thank you for the help

i appreciate it

[stuck sail]

Similar to how Forever and I manage the workload. Also, no problem!

[deft fiber]

These are texel invalidity artefacts
https://forum.unity.com/threads/faq-blocky-artifacts-appear-when-i-bake-a-scene-how-can-i-fix-them.951444/

[deft fiber]

Deferred rendering is another option, which gives you unlimited lights for very cheap
It has a lot of tradeoffs compared to Forward+, but is has been in URP for longer and is more stable as a result

[slow owl]

yea, im gonna look into it, there are some one sided meshes near the area! Thanks!

[desert olive]

so do i need refection probes and light probs if am gonna go with real time lighting with HDRP ?

all i wanna achieve is the skybox light (also known as HDRI light in real time) its super simple without HDRP

https://youtu.be/wwm98VdzD8s?t=306

but the time mark it seem you call it environment light in unity

so there is refection in my scene from the sky but there is no diffuse light

[deft fiber]

By realtime do you mean it needs to be changed at runtime?

[desert olive]

i mean i dont need to bake anything

yeah

i guess

[deft fiber]

That's a little vague

[deft fiber]

Instead of this, HDRP has environment light settings in the Volume component as "Visual Environment"

That includes ambient lighting

I would check this out
https://youtu.be/DlxuvvYZO4Q

[desert olive]

i dont want lightmap bake

[deft fiber]

Most lighting methods require some level of precomputation (though not baked lightmapping necessarily)

Enlighten's realtime GI also requires baking

Ray traced GI and path tracing do not

[desert olive]

jesus christ in unreal non of that was required to do HDRI lighting

lol

i will watch the whole video today soon

[deft fiber]

They're not required for a HDRi, but I'm not sure if we're on the same page
I can't give very precise suggestions unless I know what you precisely want, or what the constraints are

[desert olive]

ill watch the video

if i didnt find the answer ill try to be more concise with my question

but i hope it will be there

[deft fiber]

Any examples of how the visuals of the game should be helpful!
Unreal is undoubtedly more advanced in HD lighting, and more of it works out of the box, but Unity can get you pretty far if you find the features that fit your use case

[desert olive]

well then ill show you an example from unreal

[idle schooner]

How do i fix this splotchiness on the curtain? It's due to baked lighting

1. double-sided GI is on in the material
2. Scale in lightmap is set to 2
3. Lighmap UVs have been automatically generated by Unity. Is this causing the issue?

HDRP, Unity 2021.3.21f1

[desert olive]

this is what am getting from unity directions light or spot light or point light

and this is what i wanna achive

hdri lighting without baking or light map

you can rotate the map in real time and it changes the light

[idle schooner]

apologies for not reading prior info, but have you tried using a custom HDRI skybox?

[desert olive]

am unable to get it to work with HDRP

xd

without HDRP everything is fine

[deft fiber]

It seems a HDRi sky is indeed what you want
02:47 in the video I linked earlier

[desert olive]

oki i havenet seen it yet i will thank you so much

[deft fiber]

The splotches might be "fireflies"
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8467172
But many problems manifest as noise like that, so I'd go through this guide looking for similar problems that might match

[idle schooner]

wow brilliant guide, thank you. I'll go through it and see if it solves the problem

at first glance, it doesn't seem like a fireflies issue because it's concentrated to a single specific asset

[idle schooner]

did an automatic unwrap of the curtain's UVs. That seems to solve the problem for now. Thanks for your help :D

[arctic isle]

If you're planning on making a procedurally generated 3D game and are considering using 2023.2+, we just released (2023.2.0a8) an improvement to baked Light Probes which allows you to change their positions at runtime.

This means that you can additively load a scene, move it and then move the probes to their new positions. Note that this relates to Light Probe Groups that are baked with CPU/GPU, not Probe Volumes or Enlighten.

Have a look at the documentation, try it out if you're curious and let me / us know if you run into any issues or have any questions.

Cheers!

[pallid bear]

Is there a way to reduce shadow priority for a light? For example:

Here the light from the lamp post should definitely be dominant over moonlight. Reducing shadow intensity does literally just that, but it doesn't reduce their priority

[deft fiber]

What do you mean by "shadow priority"

[pallid bear]

I mean the light from the lightpost should be dominant and therefore the shadow should be cast by that over the directional light shadow

[deft fiber]

A shadow is just an area that's occluded from the light source that's casting it
Beyond that I don't think there's any other type of blending or priority system that affects them

[pallid bear]

ok but why do I have shadows for directional light and very dim shadows for other lights

it looks wrong

[deft fiber]

Shadow intensity lerps between fully occluded and not at all occluded

[pallid bear]

Look at this

clearly the shadows are wrong

The tree shadow on the floor is from directional light and you can also see the other one from the lantern but that's clearly wrong

light from these lanterns should dominate the moonlight

if you know what I mena

[deft fiber]

This looks "correct" to me

Right under the lantern its light does seem to dominate the moonlight as the tree shadow isn't visible there

But to have the two light conditions at drastically different exposures you'd need some kind of dynamic exposure system

I assume what you see as wrong is the lack of dynamic exposure

[pallid bear]

It is true that I might not b expressing myself correctly but for example in this one, does the shadow from the tower being on the side of the lamp post not look wrong to you?

[patent moth]

So I'm just stepping into 3d today, made a little lava cube to have some cool lighting via emissions and... it doesn't quite seem to effect my other cubes! What do I need to learn about to make this possible?

[deft fiber]

Your moonlight is much brighter than any moonlight I've seen and not far from the lanter's brightness but given that, the shadows look consistent

[pallid bear]

fair point

I should probably reduce the intensity

[pallid bear]

What the emmission intensity?

[deft fiber]

Do note that shadow brightness also depends on ambient lighting

[pallid bear]

I haven't baked GI yet but tbh removing directional light gives me cool vibes

like this

[patent moth]

The intensity is around +2, but that seems to make it brighter for the camera, and doesn't cause the light to begin to effect the walls unfortunately 😦

[pallid bear]

looks cool but it looks very bad in unlit places

maybe I should go for good GI instead of directional light? What do you think

[pallid bear]

you probably didn't enable bloom

which is why it has no effect on other objects

[patent moth]

No bloom is enabled -- maybe I am just underestimating what effect it has on my other cubes?

[pallid bear]

You need bloom for emmission to work properly. You need to enable it as post processing filter

google the exact steps

[patent moth]

Sorry, I meant that no -- bloom is enabled.

[pallid bear]

oh

[deft fiber]

For emissive surfaces to emit light and not just glow, you need to use baked lightmapping, precomputed lightmapping, ray traced global illumination or path tracing
SSR also allows for some reflected light from any surface
The availability of these features depends on render pipeline

[patent moth]

Oh okay, so "baking lightmaps" is probably the step I'm missing here. I assume this is readily available through URP?

[deft fiber]

Baked and precomputed lightmaps indeed are, the others are not

[deft fiber]

If you have a directional light I recommend a very faint one, that dark version already looks pretty good to me
It's mostly a technical decision if you want baked lightmapped GI or just an ambient probe for GI

[pallid bear]

man I'm experimenting with this and no directional light + DOF looks kinda sick honestly

looks dope as hell but it does look very bad in places with no light

you've convinced me to start experimenting with this more and delaying the trailer some more 😄

[deft fiber]

The "professional" way would be to just add more lights instead of expanding the rendering complexity, I suspect!

Could have more types of light sources to break up the pace like fireflies or dying campfires

That still keep the dark areas reasonably dim

[pallid bear]

haha yeah but I have ''playable areas'' like these ones surrounded by just forest...Those should be areas where the player isn't supposed to go and they wouldn't make sense with light

I'll give you an example

This looks like shit, I think you'll agree

• the tree shadows look buggy in some way

[deft fiber]

The trees don't seem to be receiving any ambient light at all
That was a known issue in some Unity versions iirc, maybe still is

[pallid bear]

ok I'm convinced this is the way

no directional lighting + DOF

looks very atmospheric, I dig it

I will find a way to make this work

[deft fiber]

I've been avoiding the terrain foliage system like a plague so I'm not much help there

[patent moth]

Guuuuh so sick, thank you Spazi.

[deft fiber]

Anyway if you decide to try get more out of global illumination, it's important to know that there's two parallel systems

[pallid bear]

But wait a minute, I might be misunderstanding something here. Ambient light is GI, right? If I haven't baked GI, they won't receive ambient light, no?

the trees I mean

[deft fiber]

Normally everything receives ambient GI because the editor generates it for you automatically to some degree

[pallid bear]

hm, interesting

[deft fiber]

Which is why your ground or meshes aren't pitch black when out of light

The "generate" button in lighting window, if "Baked Global Illumination" is disabled, generates a reflection probe and an ambient probe from the skybox or whatever is your Environment Lighting's Source, which then will be used for all meshes (except trees if they refuse to cooperate)

[patent moth]

Ah so you need to re-bake lighting every time you make changes to the scene that would effect it, like adding a new lava cube or a wall here. Is baking lights something people usually same until the "end"?

[pallid bear]

Yeah actually I can see the skybox in the puddles so that works I guess

[deft fiber]

More or less
Sometimes work in progress bakes are necessary but you can get by with very low bake quality settings for those

[pallid bear]

Generally, I'd stick to doing baking last (which I'm doing) so as to avoid that tedious process. I don't know why people don't do it that way

[deft fiber]

That's also the part the editor does automatically, but it may not persist in build or in scene change
However, with Baked Global Illumination enabled you'll be doing a whole ray tracing bake of every static object in the scene and creating lightmaps for them, as well as writing lighting to light probes if you have those
Those will then be used in stead of the singular probes from the "ambient GI" light generation

[deft fiber]

With optimized settings and GPU acceleration a non-final bake might take as little as 10 seconds so it's not terrible by any means

[pallid bear]

I guess the most important question there is will it look better or not?

cause it's a commital process and I don't have experience

[patent moth]

I see! Do you happen to be aware what kind of settings I'd be looking to tone down in order to achieve a lower quality, but quicker bake? I assume lowering just about everything here would help, but do you know of anything that would disproportionately effect the time it takes to bake compared with other settings?

[pallid bear]

also, just reducing the instensity of the directional light looks good and removes the tree and terrain bug issues

might keep it at that, will see

[pallid bear]

texture is the most impactful AFAIK

[patent moth]

Like, the resolution of the texture I'm using on my objects?

[pallid bear]

no, lightmap resolution

[deft fiber]

If you can avoid all the problems then it likely will look better
Placing light probes especially will help create areas of darker darkness in the already shadowed, occluded areas
But there are a lot of potential problems to tread through if you're not experienced with baking, and it may be hard to judge if you've done it right in vaguely lit scenes
And I have no idea how trees will work with you in that case, if they will at all

[patent moth]

Ah! That helps 👍

Oh wow that certainly had a huge effect both in rendering time and quality.

[deft fiber]

These are fine, but you'll want to use Progressive GPU if you have a dedicated GPU
You can also reduce samples to half or to something even less

[pallid bear]

ok then maybe I will avoid it...I've got the gameplay working and trying to get out a trailer soon, that would just delay everything and I don't know how many issues I'd have...

[pallid bear]

Yea I mean just increase them in the final bake, otherwise you're losing your time

this is why I chose to do this last

[patent moth]

Oh, my, good catch, I actually thought I was using GPU, but misread it. 🙂

[pallid bear]

Does this scene need volumetric fog on the ground? Hmmm

[deft fiber]

Volumetric might be overkill, and URP doesn't have that either
Some mist particles with a soft particle shader might be well enough, and look visually interesting too

[pallid bear]

I know I meant fake volumetric

I saw some solutions

like

https://aetuts.itch.io/volumetric-fog-unity-lwrpurp-shader-graph

[deft fiber]

Right, those shaders using depth
That could work too

[pallid bear]

this one maybe

btw are you a professional dev? I see you everywhere here

[deft fiber]

I work as an instructor but not as a developer in official capacity ^^

[pallid bear]

Ah you're an actual instructor here? Cool

[deft fiber]

Not here, but locally where I live rather
Here I hang out and try to answer questions to get better at it myself

[pallid bear]

Oh cool...I thought you wouldn't be doing it in your free time too :p

[patent moth]

So let's say I wanted my character to be carrying around a little pixel art sword. I could make that a UI object like the old DOOM games, but if I want that to be effected by the lighting, I'll probably have to give it an in-game model.

Is there a Learn module on mixing baked lights with realtime lighting? I assume the sword would need to interact with the lights in real time, but I could keep my walls, lava, the same? How does that all work?

https://gyazo.com/5332f66b82766425c30f72497252f2f7.mp4

It's definitely getting some lighting?

[pallid bear]

btw is it true that terrain can only have 2 working reflection probes cause it's technically one game object? If so, very lame

[grand berry]

Need help with lighting

I am new

This is my lighting rn

First the floor should not be this bright

2. you wont notice it but i have a flash light on and i want to be able to see it through the darkness

3. I want more fog in my face more

Like this

[deft fiber]

I guess so
Another reason I avoid the Terrain also
No idea why it isn't "chunked"
Maybe using multiple small Terrains with "neighbor terrains" would be a solution, but I haven't tested if that produces more issues

[deft fiber]

Reflection probes and light probes store light during the baking process which can be then used by dynamic meshes in their range
Mixed lights are light components which to put it simply are treated as realtime by dynamic meshes, and as baked by static meshes (though they're also treated by realtime by static meshes according to mixed light mode's settings)

[deft fiber]

If you want the weapon exactly like Doom has it, you'd place a quad in front of the camera and swap the texture or material to animate it
As it'd exist physically there it'd receive lighting from nearby light sources

Or if you don't want it quite exactly as Doom you could have the quad be animated with 3D motion instead of texture frames

[serene elbow]

@stuck sail Hey man could you hit me up with a private message when you have time I have a question

[stuck sail]

Sorry @serene elbow but I don't open my DMs. It's the same rule I follow in the Pixel Strike Discord Server

[serene elbow]

@stuck sail Thats okay can I ask you a question here then?

[stuck sail]

Of course, I'd be happy to answer

[serene elbow]

Thank you!

I'm planning out the network system for my game so I'm just curios which one did you use for the Pixel Strike? Is it maybe one from the Photon?

[stuck sail]

Unfortunately I am unable to answer that question. I do some minimal programming with projects under the Vulcron name. However, Forever is the one who programmed Pixel Strike 3D, I worked on the 3D models, textures, animations, etc. The visual stuff.

[serene elbow]

Ohh! I understand its okay! 😄

I'm just thinking about will the sales be enough profitable for me to keep up the servers. I'm thinking about using Photon Fusion which + Photon Voice would cost around $190 for the 500 CCU Package, and since I think I wont have microtransactions in the game I'm worried if just the game sales would cover the server cost :/

[stuck sail]

You could always try photon and see how it fits your needs. It would also be a good introduction to networking frameworks as it's supposed to be easy to use

[serene elbow]

I'm familiar with the Photon, I've worked with it for some time now

I'm just worried about the cost later on

[stuck sail]

Yeah that is something you'd have to balance for your use case. You could use photon without voice, but then upgrade later when you feel the players will cover the cost. Most will be using discord when playing anyways

[serene elbow]

The problem is that the game needs the voice chat :/ It's inspired by Phasmophobia

So the proximity chat is really a must

xD

[stuck sail]

Let's take this to #archived-networking

[serene elbow]

Yes sorry 😄

[serene elbow]

@stuck sail Somehow I did this

[stuck sail]

Awesome! That is looking great, keep up the great work

[serene elbow]

Thank you! 😄

[patent moth]

So that's what that little probe-y boy is for. This is awesome info, thanks Spazi! And especially for the DOOM-aesthetic tip. Going to keep that in mind for sure.

[timber lichen]

Help, im trying to add a cookie for my spotlight but getting these artifacts at the botom

[quick saddle]

https://youtu.be/xWCZiksqCGA?t=361
does unity have a way to light objects using reflection probe cubemaps, like this video here?

[deft fiber]

Yes, you get this by default via ambient light and reflection probes generated from the sky material set in environment lighting settings

Manually placed reflection and light probes do this also once baked

[quick saddle]

oh, nice

well it works but my skybox is blurry for some reason
I downloaded this exr texture https://polyhaven.com/a/blaubeuren_night
Imported as cubemap and made a skybox material

oh i had to set the texture to 2d instead of cube

weird

[night shell]

the convolution type is specular

thats why

[pastel skiff]

Why do my realtime shadows look like this in urp? They shadows also change whenever you move (the overall shadows not the fact it is realtime)

[quick saddle]

That had no change

[lunar pollen]

whats the best way to get consistent lightmap texel sizes in world space?

is the only way to go through my scene and adjust the lightmap resolution for all mesh renderers separately?

[deft fiber]

Does this happen with all the shadows or just with the flashlight? Have you checked if the mesh is obscuring the light, or if the shadow problems appear even if the light is moved away from the flashlight

[deft fiber]

As far as I know meshes should be getting fairly consistent size in lightmap if you let unity generate their lightmap UVs and their scales are close to 1

It's why it's important to try to export/import meshes without wildly large or small scales

[paper maple]

I am not sure why this happens, but for some reason there is light on the tree trunks. even tho there is a little tinny of light, but not enought to light up a tree trunk. does anyone know why this happens

[deft fiber]

It looks like the ground and trees are lit because your shadow distance ends there
Not sure what other type of light you could be referring to

[stark temple]

could also be reflections

🗃️ Documentation

Lighting Overview
Setting up the Lighting Pipeline

Packages

URP Lights 2D
HDRP Lights

📚 Resources

Tutorials

• Creative Core: Lighting
• HDRP Shadow Settings
• HDRP 4 Techniques to Light Environments (Unite 2022)
• Lighting for Believable Visuals

Blogs and e-books

• High Quality Light Fixtures
• Guide to lighting in HDRP

🤔 Troubleshooting

• Lightmap troubleshooting

🗺️ Roadmap

Global illumination roadmap

[paper maple]

Do u want me to show what lights I have in the scene 🙂

I mean i could just use fog, becuase that is what the kevel is ment to be, but for future projects, there must be a way to fix this right ?

[deft fiber]

You should check if changing the realtime shadow distance improves the problem

[paper maple]

alright ill give that a shot

[deft fiber]

I can't see any other issue that sticks out to me from those 4 circled trees so I can't say exactly what will "fix" it

[paper maple]

Ok its a bit hard to show all the lights as there is to many of them haha

its this tree

[deft fiber]

Well, we don't need to see all the lights, just the ones affecting the tree or a better demonstration of what apparent lighting you mean specifically
Like Vertx said it could also be from the ambient reflection probe, or the ambient light probe

[paper maple]

Wait I have worked it out, its my head lights for my car, it is to bright. I have answer my own question

Sorry for wasting time

[deft fiber]

Well, that's ideal isn't it
Just try to make problem demonstrations as clear as possible to speed things up, and that also helps lead yourself towards a solution

[timber lichen]

I'

I'm not sure what these weird spheres are when lighting is enabled in the scene view

[deft fiber]

What shader and lighting are you using for this mesh

[timber lichen]

its just primitives

not sure what you mean specifically by lighting

actually i read that wrong

sorry

let me check

[timber lichen]

nvm I'm good it was just the scene view mode

[pallid bear]

https://streamable.com/4uge0u

fog or no fog?

[deft fiber]

I think it looks great ^^

[pallid bear]

You mean the fog?

[deft fiber]

Yes

[pallid bear]

Thank you, I may keep it

it adds to the atmosphere although it makes the map less clear

but cmon it's a zombie swamp, it has to have fog

[deft fiber]

If it doesn't obfuscate elements of gameplay importance, then it shouldn't be a problem
In fact such visual unclarity is one way you can draw attention away from the unimportant parts, and even cut corners since you need less detail there

Lighting design is very closely tied to gameplay design

[pallid bear]

yea I'll keep it

[night shell]

fog looks good

fog adds extra depth to an image

I say keep it

makes it easier to read the terrain

[pallid bear]

Thanks

is there really no fullscreen in unity?

I want to record some footage but I can't make playmode fullscreen

[night shell]

not really in the editor, the closest you can get as far as I know is just maximizing your game window

[pallid bear]

Man it's 2023, how do we not have fullscreen?

unity is stuck in 1989

[bleak vortex]

I've recently stumbled upon this game, and I saw they are using the built in render pipeline & unity. Just wondering how to achieve this flat, even lighting through the whole level like they did. It would seem there is no directional light -- just that the walls have slightly darker textures. Perhaps a custom shader or something?

[bleak vortex]

I suppose this is sort of achievable by turning off shadows, and then angling the directional light properly (ie -/+45 deg). I am sure there are options to increase the effect further.

[deft fiber]

Could be done as you've done it, perhaps with the base texture as the emission texture (with emission color intensity tuned to taste) to make shadows less pronounced

That way you'd still get some fresnel and specular from the PBR lighting of the standard lit shader, which isn't really accurate to the style but can be reduced by setting smoothness to zero and AO to zero as well

[bleak vortex]

Do you think the light drafts are just a transparent mesh or something? They don't look like actual lights

[deft fiber]

Or the walls could be a custom unlit shader that only renders some simple directional light shading but nothing else

• fog

[deft fiber]

Definitely not lights, probably geometry with an unlit additively blended shader

[bleak vortex]

Yes this made the most sense to me as well, thanks for the information

[cinder charm]

I probably should have posted it here first but:
Could someone help me with my URP lighting. I have deferred rendering on on but on 6 or so of my mixed light fixtures are rending in realtime.
https://youtu.be/uuGPMJSDbTI

[pallid bear]

Why can't I get the bridge and the lantern to reflect? I tried moving the reflection probe to no avail. They are there on the cubemap

[little condor]

Have you tried increasing the Smoothness and Metallic values on your water material, just to check if the material can reflect the cubemap?

I would also say that a cubemap isn't best for water reflections, so try a Planar reflection probe on the surface of the water too. That will reflect the underside of the bridge.

[pallid bear]

I don't think we have that in URP but I might try some other tricks

[deft fiber]

Box projected reflection probes will have matching parallax only at the boundary extents

[pallid bear]

aaah

near plane?

will check

[deft fiber]

A box projected reflection probe is basically reflecting a room (or a box) which has the cubemap painted to its walls

[deft fiber]

URP's deferred rendering is not supported on WebGL, at least not in URP 12.1 or 13.0
From 13.1 I think it might, though I don't know WebGL or OpenGL/WebGL APIs well enough to say that for sure

URP 14.0 implements Forward+ so if you get into the tech stream versions you may be able to skip deferred rendering altogether

[pallid bear]

I still didn't manage to get the reflection. I think the lamp reflections aren't showed anywhere even though they're marked static and visible inside the cubemap

[deft fiber]

You can't get them with reflection probes, is what I'm trying to say (besides planar)

The box shape is the only kind of parallax you can get, whereas the lantern is hovering directly above the pond away from everything

[pallid bear]

I didn't mean that lantern specifically. I have lanterns on trees where those trees show up as well as the light reflection but not the lamp mesh

[deft fiber]

Still you're limited to the box shape for reflections
The lamp meshes exist only as projections on that box and will not match the light sources

[cinder charm]

how do i upgrade to URP 14?

[quartz harbor]

hi fellas, i got a bug i can't figure out... I'm using unity 2021 LTS 3D pipeline and i have 3 point lights in my scene

in play mode and builds on my laptop I can see colored lights from these sources on terrain

but when i run the same build on my steam deck very little to no light is appearing from these sources

any help appreciated

i should point out i'm running windows build on win 10 installed to steamdeck with provided AMD graphics drivers

[cinder charm]

URP?

[quartz harbor]

old 3D render pipe

i added a terrain and disabled auto generate

also disabled realtime global illumination as it wouldn't build

[plucky topaz]

is there a way to make lighting on each texture pixel? like take this scene for example:

note that the pixels of the low res texture arent being lit in a more "abrupt" way, but the lighting is more "beautifuly" scared across the scene. Is there a way to make so the light is applied to each pixel individually? not a normal map, but just make that each light and shadow is different in each pixel

note how smooth the shadows are, cant i make so they are snaped to the neares pixel?

this is in blender, cuz it would take a while to throw the scene into unity, but just for clarification

[deft fiber]

URP versions are tied to editor versions so for URP 14.0 you'd need 2022.2. editor

[deft fiber]

There is
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/3d-pixel-art-shadows-texel-space-lighting-shader-for-urp-170074 Paid asset for URP
https://forum.unity.com/threads/the-quest-for-efficient-per-texel-lighting.529948/ DIY instructions

[empty nacelle]

Ran into this strange issue with my HDRP spotlights. They stop rendering if I look at the light source. If anyone has had a similar issue and knows where I should look any advice would be appreciated! I've spent a whole day already debugging trying to fix it with 0 luck.

Gif showing issue: https://gyazo.com/2aef1aafe417758415d2c0c95ec33aee

From what I've tested, it seems to only happen if you're looking in the direction of the actual light object that is emitting the light.

[small meadow]

why unity realtime lightning make this artifacts when creating lightmaps?

it should be all black

[grim summit]

how do i fix "overlapping uvs" when baking

[small meadow]

is this an answer for me?

bc i think we are having the same problem

[grim summit]

I have the same issue

[small meadow]

oh ok

you solved it?

[grim summit]

Nope

imported things from blender and just cant bake

trying to reduce lag

[small meadow]

i'm trying every way to solve it

[grim summit]

ive been going to the docs and looking everything up

nothing can help

[deft fiber]

Usually you enable "generate lightmap UVs" in each mesh's import settings

[small meadow]

i did it

and still didn't solve anything

[deft fiber]

If it fails, it may be that something modifies the mesh UVs (such as probuilder) or that lightmap padding is insufficient
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProgressiveLightmapper-UVOverlap.html

[grim summit]

where is that located

[deft fiber]

Mesh import settings

[grim summit]

but where is that?

[deft fiber]

When you select an imported asset, such as a mesh, in the Project window, the Inspector will show that asset's import settings

[grim summit]

ohhh the prefabb

still dont see it

oh its on

then why is it still

[small meadow]

btw, if i'm making a procedural generated level, should i use realtime or baked lighttmap?

[grim summit]

depends on what you want

[small meadow]

a roguelike game

[deft fiber]

That setting is mainly for Progressive lightmapper
Enlighten's realtime GI may use a different method for storing the lightmaps, and it generally has different problems and solutions but I'm not super familiar with it

[grim summit]

after finishing baking....

[deft fiber]

Is it a probuilder mesh? I believe those are created procedurally so baking and precomputing lighting for them might not work correctly, unless exported to a static nonmodifiable mesh

[deft fiber]

Baked lightmaps and precomputed realtime GI will always be more difficult to use with procedural levels or geometry

[small meadow]

k

[grim summit]

blender

[deft fiber]

Then I don't know, I'd look into Enlighten's common issues and practice baking with it in simple scenes

[past forge]

Hello! I'm using HDRP and want to generate lighting with a probe volume, but I'm having some problems.

First off, when placing a probe volume in my scene, I can't see any probes when using Display Probes in the Rendering Debugger. The probe volume has a message telling me to generate the lighting in the lighting window, so I figured that's why. However, when generating lighting, Unity first "waits for Unity's code to finish executing" for a few minutes, and then the progress bar just stays on 0% and says "Baking...". It's been there for half an hour, and the CPU usage only sits at around 40%. If I move the scene view camera into a certain position in the scene, the progress bar suddenly shows completely different progress data, and says I have either hours or seconds until completion, and the CPU usage spikes. Then, after a second or two, it returns to 0%, but the CPU usage stays at 100% for a couple of minutes, before falling back down again. I tried removing the probe volume and disabling probe volumes, and when generating lighting without it, the progress bar similarly sits at 0% for several minutes, but eventually completes, although it doesn't look like the lighting has changed at all. I've tried this multiple times, even trying things like restarting my computer and disabling and re-enabling probe volumes, and it's still the same. It seems to be the same whether I use CPU or GPU Lightmapper.

Does anyone have any idea what this could be about? I'm really at my wits' end. Thanks you in advance!

[cinder charm]

im in URP 14 and have lights coming through and object that casts shadows

any way to solve this

[brisk sedge]

Hello, I am here for your guidance. I baked lights in my scene. But in our project some objects can be spawned depending on circumstances. Those objects are also static and do not move. How should I approach this kind of problem, I want to bake lights for them as well, but I dont want them to cast shadows when they are not needed.

I could try use light probes instead of light maps for thos objects, or there is some kind of dynamic lights backing? or a way to bake lighting for specidic game object, and then just merge the light maps when I spawn. Any guidance would be appreciated.

[arctic isle]

Have them receive lighting from light probes instead

[brisk sedge]

Thank you. I ended up with this approach. It is not perfect, but good enough. Thank you for your response!

[worthy sapphire]

Anyone know if there's a way to get an effect similar to the box lights in the HPL engines in unity? Basically localized flat ambient lighting , maybe with falloffs and stuff?

Like, I remember trying some decal projectors at some point but they didn't really get the job done properly

[deft fiber]

You'd probably have to code that kind of feature almost from scratch

The SRP volume framework could be used for it, but you'd need to make your own lit shader that can find and read those volumes similar to how HDRP indirect light controller override does

Or modify the existing lit shader which is a messy process

[worthy sapphire]

oof

that sounds like a bother

[final lance]

what is the difference between a regular lit/unlit shader and a "sprite" lit/unlit?

like obviously lit uses lighting/specularity over unlit but

[deft fiber]

@worthy sapphire It might be possible to utilize the existing light probe system to set ambient lighting manually per area, but I don't know how difficult it is to write to them manually
At a glance there didn't seem to be a function to easily set the probes manually

[deft fiber]

A sprite shader is required for sprite masking, I think 2D sorting and maybe some other 2D specific rendering features

[final lance]

lighting is such a pain in the ass

[deft fiber]

Kind of, but those things aren't related to lighting ^^
What's probably obvious is that the Sprite Lit is lit by 2D lighting only, and the Lit by 3D lighting only

[final lance]

well that's surprisingly simple. Thanks

[ancient creek]

Hey guys, I'm having a problem with unity baked lighting, I really don't know what it is and why it's happening...maybe player settings? but the baked lighting gets wrecked when I hit play mode. don't mind the pink layer at the bottom is a scripted fog. Or what is this artifact called so I can search it more. Thanks!

[dim zodiac]

hey does anybody know why light flicker when looking around

here an example

[deft fiber]

"Pixel light limits per object" looks like

[dim zodiac]

so how fix man

im little bit new with unity

ue5 man

but this is a school project

[deft fiber]

#archived-lighting message

[dim zodiac]

the problem is i cant find the pixel light setting

im in the quality project settings

but its not there at all

[deft fiber]

Since you're using URP it'll be in the URP asset referred in the quality setting level

[dim zodiac]

ahh i see

its already at the highest

dammit

[final lance]

here's another dumb question: so like for a lamppost giving off light, do I want it to be a light source or do I want it to be emissive? sounds stupid but just wondering what the reasoning behind picking one over the other is

[dim zodiac]

I FIXED IT

ALHAMDUILLAH

[dim zodiac]

Ty brother

[deft fiber]

Often both, but it depends
Light sources are useful for actually illuminating nearby objects
Emissive materials can glow visually, but do not illuminate anything unless baked to lightmaps/probes or when using raytraced, raymarched or pathtraced reflections

[final lance]

woah, very interesting

thank you

[opal arrow]

Any idea what causes this artifacting on the corner wall when baking my lighting? It's a flat colour.

[cinder charm]

Did anyone know the solution to this

[night shell]

double sided shadow casters

@cinder charm

[unique mango]

Is there anyone who can help with reflection probes ?

basicaly is there any way to make REALISTIC reflections? I know that sounds weird.

In my level I have straight corridor and I have some water puddles there.

something like this

and when I add reflection probes, no matter what settings I set, this looks awful and weird, reflections are too big or too stretched

this works like in the total center of this reflection probe sphere everything is allright but the further it goes, the worse it looks

ex. 1
On these settings, reflections are too large and look like the reflected object has always been above you, even though it is not.

ex. 2 Hovever on these settings, 2 reflections are combined together on one puddle... and it looks like u have 2 rooms there.

ex. 3 On these settings where I have 1 reflection probe instead of separate 2, the reflection is not even relative to the actual position of reflecting object. and this looks awfull and stretched.

picture to the right is showing how player is looking at Z axis at the end of reflection zone, u see how it looks.

PS. Just bumped up R.P intensity to give a better look of this.

Settings im changing are:
Box projection, Blend distance (doing nothing)
position of probe and box offset. Importance (doing nothing)

example of how reflections are not relative to position of objects.

wtf is even this

[night shell]

those are box projected reflections for you

[night shell]

I noticed that you have a box offset for your reflection probe, that could contribute to your reflections looking more incorrect than they should be

[deft fiber]

Whether box-projected or not, reflection probes are very limited so in most cases you'll have to use them for vague reflections and preferably with non-mirror materials

[unique mango]

Yeah box offset is somehow changing the look of it. I figured it out by myself earlier

[deft fiber]

I guess that explains the distortion? I can see they look weird, but not clearly how

Blend Distance is determines how the reflections fade from meshes at the extents of the bounding volume
Importance decides the priority for overlapping reflection probes

[unique mango]

Oh okay that explains a lot.

Especially the last one. I have an idea and I'll check it tommorow.

[night shell]

generally I would keep the box offset at zero at all times

@deft fiber is right, reflection probes can only be so accurate

but keep box offset at zero at all times, in my experience reflection probes generally look best when they are in dead center of the box volume

[brisk sedge]

so yellow lines and 3 balls should show me which light probes were used for the object lighting right?

Problem is that on this scene the light probes are in totally different places. I am loading scenes as additive scene. It seems previous scene which was unloaded light probes are still in use. How to solve this problem?

manually calling LightProbes.TetrahedralizeAsync(); does not seems to work as well

[void orchid]

I have a weird lighting issue Im clueless on how to fix, im using HDRP btw

Scene view it looks fine

game view is

I understand this could be a post processing issue however I have no idea what would cause that

other lights are also an issue but not as bad

nvm, it was motion blur

[limber delta]

Hello. Is a "Skybox Material" and/or a "Sun Source" mandatory for scenes in unity? I realized everything is indoors in my scene and all windows are emissive surfaces.. Just want to make sure nothing breaks without them. Thanks!

[deft fiber]

Not mandatory
Sun Source is not mandatory in general since it picks the brightest directional light for use with the dynamic skybox
Since you aren't using a skybox at all, that won't be necessary either
Just means you can't use Background Type: Skybox in your main camera, or Environment Lighting Source: Skybox in environment light settings

[limber delta]

Perfect. Thanks for the info!

[kind mortar]

I need help

I baked lights for my map, and it looks good on the PC build

but when i switch to the android build it looks terrible

another map i made has baked lights and looks the same on both platforms

im using URP if that matters

i forgot to change the setting for my directional light to baked

kill me

[timber lichen]

is it possible to add 2D shadow caster to unity's particle system?

To make these particles have shadows

[crisp topaz]

does anyone know why my none static objects are not registering the whole light probe and only one part of it?

[stable patio]

Did you rebuild lighting after placing new probes?

[crisp topaz]

ah shoot, ye baking helped. Thanks. First time setting up light probes 🫠

[hot path]

why do my trees have a blue outline lol

ambient lighting is 0

[storm flax]

skybox reflections

put in your own probe or use other reflection methods to get rid of it

[sharp goblet]

Anyone have tips for not being limited by shadowmasks 4 overlapping light limits? To adequately light my scene I need to make my light range fairly large, but then I have lots of overlaps and have to make some of them baked. This really kills the visual quality when some lights just don't cast shadows 😦

[placid bough]

Not sure if this is the correct channel for this problem but my skybox is currently melting with surrounding textures and I'm not sure what's causing it. No errors or warnings are present in the console

[stark temple]

Make sure your camera's clear flags are set to a color or the skybox

[placid bough]

Thanks man

[vestal oriole]

https://youtu.be/rLvbwNAFGRQ?t=1003

is there a way to achieve a lighting effect similar to the ones done in streets of rage?

[quick saddle]

Normal maps?

[deft fiber]

These seem to use mask maps as secondary textures that store directionality in color channels
Normal maps can get you something similar but the angles would have to be totally flat

[vestal oriole]

ah thanks

is there a good software to use that can help create mask maps?

[lunar gust]

Why is my baked lighting so inaccurate?

left is baked, right is realtime.

here are the same light data but from further away

why is there such a large difference when i move up to objects

my settings ^

[stuck jetty]

you need reflection probe

[hot path]

you said left is baked right

that looks much cleaner imo

[sick peak]

I am hoping someone here can shed a little light on the above. The 1st image with the glow of the letters is how it should look, but it keeps changing to the 2nd image where the glow is not even and way less glowing. I am stumped as to what is causing this as it has happened a few times and the only way to solve is to go back to an older version of my project. In both of these images, everything is the same. Both have emissive materials with the exact same properties, with the exact same light bake settings, with the same project settings, in the same version of Unity. Everything around the words is the same too as well as everything in the scene. Even if I copy/export/import over the scene from the one that works, it ends up looking the same as the 2nd image. Each time this has happened I was not editing this scene all, but rather was working on something totally unrelated to lighting. Once this issue happens, it does not matter what version of Unity I use, it will not bake like the 1st image. It is driving me crazy and I am hoping someone here may have some insights as to what is going on.

[lunar gust]

yea

i ended up fixing it sort of

i ended up doing a mixed lighting setup

[fair lily]

Hi,

I wish to use the 2D Freeform Light (using the 2D renderer) and use a shadow caster to... well have shadows. From testing, I understand that the shadows are cast from the object depending on the direction of the transform coordinates of the light. I have the desired effect but sadly if the object with the shadow caster is past a certain distance, the shadow is not cast anymore. This mean I can't simulate a shadow from a distant source (godrays).

I was wondering if it was possible to extend this range somehow ?

[sullen plaza]

Hi guys, is there any way to create 2D lighting with shadows in UNITY WEBGL? Like in Godot for example?

[fair wren]

Hey guys, do any of you have any idea about why the lighting doesn't work inside Unity? I tried all the answers that stackoverflow gives and nothing

[fair wren]

What a beautiful skybox

[arctic isle]

Yes, when opening / making a project with the 2D URP render pipeline you will find those lights under GameObject / Light. Make sure to read the docs / watch some tutorials on how these work.

[arctic isle]

Can you be a bit more specific about what you are trying to achieve and what you've done so far?

[arctic isle]

You will also need the Shadow Caster component for sprites.

[fair wren]

I'm trying to put a spotlight, basically it doesn't work. And even if I try with another type of light, it doesn't seem to work either (except with the directional light, which seems to work normally). In fact I'm not trying to do anything fancy, just put the light xd.

The solutions I find on the internet all boil down to the same thing: clear the cache. I did that and they still don't work. I theorize that it may be something in my URP settings, but I don't remember moving anything.

[arctic isle]

Is the light reaching any surfaces?

If you point it straight into a wall, does it work?

[fair wren]

Absolutely none. I tried in another scene with a default cube and they don't work either xd

[fair wren]

Nopi

[arctic isle]

So just one light in a scene with the default cube didn't work. It does sound like some rendering setting is awry.

Can you maybe try making some default URP settings, replce your custom ones, see if it works and diff the settings to see what's changed?

[arctic isle]

And what version are you using just to make sure we have all the context?

[fair wren]

I'm using Unity 2021.3.22f1

[fair wren]

I will try this you say to see if it works!

[fair wren]

It seems to be fixed. Unity was taking the "optimized" setting that was set in "Quality" from instead of taking the one inside "Graphics" which it assumed it was. So it must be the URP Optimized setting (that Unity creates by default) that is causing the lights to not render.

[dim zodiac]

why everything black

anybody know how to fix

[deft fiber]

If the dark materials are meant to be shiny, it seems likely that they're reflecting the black "sky" outside of your level, if there are no valid reflection probes to get reflections from

[dim zodiac]

ahhh

i see

[dim zodiac]

Idk how to fix it

I tried everything man

[arctic isle]

Is this baked or realtime lighting?

[dim zodiac]

Baked

Cause i tried realtime

[arctic isle]

Did you check "generate lightmap uvs" in the mesh importers?

[dim zodiac]

But the problem is that it makes the other light flicker too

[dim zodiac]

Wjats wrong with it

[arctic isle]

And check the static checkbox at the top right in the obj inspector?

[arctic isle]

Not wrong, it's the correct thing to do

[dim zodiac]

Damn havent done that

I check when i get home

[arctic isle]

Nice, and of course click Generate Lighting in the Lighting Window

[low dock]

Hi, I'm having trouble with lighting and I'm literally one very small bug away from finishing this entire thing.
Currently, my problem is that when I shine a spot light on my drawn shapes, the surface layer appears super bright. I can show a before and after:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497874004401586176/1094343915450138775/image.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497874004401586176/1094343958747938826/image.png

I just want the board and the contents on the board to be illuminated, but I don't want the shapes to appear crazy bright like this.

[arctic isle]

Reduce the range of the light

[low dock]

Okay, that fixes that problem, but now the spotlight looks like it's barely doing anything.

[rustic kestrel]

Kinda hard to see, but as my game gets darker (it has a day / night system) there are waves of light coming in which I'm guessing shouldn't be visible. Anyone know how I can go about disabling them?

[low dock]

my spotlight is a distance away from the board, mind you. should i attempt to just move it closer or something?

[arctic isle]

Increase the Intensity perhaps and move it closer ^

[low dock]

Okay, I'll try that and report back with results soon

[arctic isle]

If you have a directional light that you're rotating, make sure you're dimming it / turning it off so it doesn't leak through any terrain / mesh backfaces

[twin arrow]

how do i fix this weird lighting on my model?

[arctic isle]

Window > Rendering > Lighting and go to the Environment tab, choose color instead of skybox and turn off env reflections

[rustic kestrel]

The light is being rotated and dimmed over time, same with the strength of the shadows. There just seems to be a really weird wave of light going over everything, which was happening before that was added too

I'll try and record it in a bit

[arctic isle]

Yep that would help a lot!

[twin arrow]

unfortunately, this hasnt worked. it doesnt happen with my other models, just this one.

[arctic isle]

What does your mesh renderer component look like? Is it the same as the rest of the objects?

[twin arrow]

my model has a skinned mesh renderer, which none of my other models use

[arctic isle]

Hmmmm there's likely a setting in there, possibly about env or probe lighting that you need to adjust. Don't remember off the top of my head sorry 😦

In the skinned mesh renderer that is

[low dock]

So I moved it closer and increased intensity but it's not quite what I want. In this picture, I set the spotlight far away so that it could shine on the entire board evenly, but ofc, increasing the range would make it shine brightly on everything. Intensity makes there be a very bright white spot in the center of where the light is aiming.

I can't put the light in the top right anymore because it'll only really shine in the top right of the drawing board

And bottom center is also plausible but I'm having trouble getting the lighting to be spread evenly across the board

[arctic isle]

Are you using baked or realtime lights?

[low dock]

realtime

[arctic isle]

Would it perhaps help if you adjust the materials on the shiny objects and (if you don't already) use Linear colorspace and HDR?

[low dock]

So the shapes I'm using are just default Unity shapes with RGB

the shapes I'm drawing onto the board, that is

[arctic isle]

You can also try to open up the spotlight's angle or use multiple lights (though that's expensive 😦 )

[low dock]

And how do I change the latter settings?

[low dock]

and yeah, i opened up the angle, it's just that if i make the light too 'luminous,' it starts to make everything white, and then if i lower those settings, it feels like the spotlight is barely doing anything

i want to make it seem like it's visually doing something but at a middle-ground

[arctic isle]

Colorspace is in the Player settings and HDR should be in Graphics and on the Camera

[low dock]

i want it to light up the whole board evenly but also not make everything white, basically

Am I able to export a WebGL build if I change it to Linear, btw? I think at one point I tried to do this and I found I wasn't able to or something.

[arctic isle]

You should be 🤔

[low dock]

I get this message

hmm

so do I just uncheck this

auto graphics API? will that break anything?

[arctic isle]

No it won't

It will just give you the option to add more apis and drag one to the top of the list to activate it.

Saying this I realize how weird the workflow is but alas