archived-lighting

[low dock]

Yeah, I'm still just getting the same issue in general. Also HDR is enabled in both already. ^^

This is with linear as well

it's weird because in my scene view, the shapes look generally fine

but in my game view, the surfaces looks so brightened

notice the mass of white at the bottom there

[arctic isle]

Are they translucent overlapping meshes?

Or can you explain what's going on? Maybe if there's too many semi-transparent shapes on top of each other it becomes overexposed?

[low dock]

Funnily enough, they're not even transparent. They're actually just solid objects and they don't interact with each other.

[twin arrow]

why is my model so lit up (ik i posted before just looking for answers)

[arctic isle]

You can try to add a slight increasing offset so the meshes don't overlap, just to see if that's a problem

Slight as in 0.000x

[low dock]

How would I do this?

[arctic isle]

As you draw, increment the z position by that offset and reset it when you clear the board

[rustic kestrel]

Should be up shortly 🙂

@arctic isle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfF7hkJ7Kjo&ab_channel=Exrotz

It's more noticeable at around the 20 second mark

The streaks of shadow on the ground

The weird waves of light shooting out to the side, which I'm guessing is the direction of the directional light

[arctic isle]

Ah yes I see. This does look like some shadow issues. I think the waves are distant shadows from trees projected really far, but that's just a guess. Are you sure that the directional light is off when it's not visible? You should switch between two light sources (one for night and one for day) to avoid this.

[rustic kestrel]

It's not completely off no, just dimmed. It has to remain on otherwise the lighting is off

And the light is constantly changing

[rustic kestrel]

It's not a shadow issue from what I can tell, could be lightmap related. There aren't many trees in the distance, and shadow strength is actually reduced over time to 0 which is when it's at the darkest point

Which is when it's happening the most 😦

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1858775/lightmapping-light-waves.html

I found this online earlier but

No one really helped him resolve it

[arctic isle]

So this is a realtime light and you have baked realtime lightmaps with enlighten rtgi?

[rustic kestrel]

yep

[arctic isle]

hm. then perhaps you'll find an answer in your lightmap parameters. if you make a new asset and play around it may fix it, but I don't have anything more specific to suggest. If your light intensity goes down to 0, I wonder if this is somehow related to ambient lighting or cloud shadows.

[arctic isle]

The waves here are texture compression artifacts, but I don't think that applies to your setup

[rustic kestrel]

I'll test some things and see what I can come up with then. 😦 I did already try messing with all of the lightmap settings but none of them fixed it.

[dim zodiac]

omg it worked

make my game look 10 times better

thx

[inner bough]

anyone able to help me with this baking glitch?

[night shell]

is it baked?

[inner bough]

yes

[night shell]

if it is, could be lightmap UVs

[inner bough]

how would i fix that

[night shell]

I'm assuming that is a custom mesh

in the unity project settings for the mesh you can enable generate lightmap uvs

[inner bough]

yes, from blender

should i share screen?

[night shell]

no

[inner bough]

k

[night shell]

should be as simple as pressing two buttons, 1 to generate it for the mesh, and 1 to rebake the lightmaps

[inner bough]

so do i rebake after?

[night shell]

yes

[inner bough]

could i ask questions if it doesnt work?

[night shell]

yes?

[inner bough]

see you in about 20-30 min

[night shell]

thats what this discord is for

[inner bough]

lol

[rustic kestrel]

Been trying to fix this for hours, does anyone have any idea what could be causing the weird dark wave of shadow going across my terrain?

https://youtu.be/CfF7hkJ7Kjo?t=20

It's not shadow related, I can disable shadows and it still happens

[inner bough]

how could i make vr quality better

[night shell]

Your going to have to be specific because that is incredibly general

[rustic kestrel]

Just accidentally fixed it, was going to install Post Processing v2 to try and at least hide it a little, and after applying an empty Post Processing effect to my camera it has completely eliminated the problem.

No idea how or why, but it did

[limber zodiac]

Do these weird lighting lines go away when you bake lights?

[arctic isle]

can you give more context?

[arctic isle]

For anyone working with Baked Lighting in 2022.2+ we have just released a small but mighty UX improvement: our very own keyboard shortcuts!

From 2022.2.0f14 onwards, you can press CTRL+9 to bring up the Lighting Window and CTRL+SHIFT+L to trigger a bake from anywhere in the Editor 💡

Time to build some muscle memory!

[fair lily]

Hi there, just reposting this in case someone have an answer,

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 ?

[brazen prism]

Any clue why the shadow is showing like this ? ( the curtain shadow on the floor )

Oh i figured it out, needed to be set for two sided shadows

[limber zodiac]

Those lighting lines appear when 2 seperate objects are next to eachother. Im wondering how to get rid of those and if it's there bc I havent baked my lighting yet? Sorry if this sounds dumb I'm not experienced with lighting

[arctic isle]

No dumb questions, we're all here to learn (even me!)

I would expect this to go away if you bake the lighting, though it's hard to know without looking at the whole scene setup. I'd say give it a go

[limber zodiac]

Ok thank you

[rustic kestrel]

How do I go about making certain objects like those flowers be affected by light?

If I drag it in to the scene it works fine, but if I put it in through the terrain it doesn't light up.

[compact rock]

Hi all. Is it possible to stop two light probe objects from influencing each other? See picture.

[deft fiber]

The light probes don't influence each other, rather mesh renderers pick the nearest probes for their lighting
The purple lines here visualize what the nearest probes would be in that inbetween area

To my knowledge you cannot mask meshes to only use specific light probe groups

[compact rock]

Okay; great. I was worried. Thank you for your time

[deft fiber]

But usually that won't be necessary
If you have probes at the furthest corners of all areas, those will be sampled near the edges unless your objects have passed out of the level area

And even if they do they start lerping towards the next probe, so with that distance it probably wouldn't be noticeable

[arctic isle]

To add to what Spazi is saying, mesh renderers sample from the tetrahedral area inside the purple lines, not the probe positions themselves. We interpolate the lighting along the mesh faces and so you get the best approximation, not the probe vertices. Probes don't affect each other, they are individual precomputed samples of indirect lighting in 3D space.

What you end up with after Tetrahedralize() is a global probe structure which you can't mask or segment because it's one tetrahedral mesh (per scene constellation).

[compact rock]

Thank you Mr. Unity

[arctic isle]

iirc the objects placed through the terrain tools are probe-lit by default.

[gleaming yarrow]

hey guys! i would love if someone could help me with good lighting in my unity game

[deft fiber]

Making good lighting is a whole trained profession, and subjective too
Your best course of action is to find tutorials and guides to follow along and post here when you run into problems

[rustic fable]

Hey guys! I bought a AMD GPU last week, and baking lighting with GPU seems to be extremely slow? Is that normal?

Is AMD not good to work with the lightmapper in unity?

Bakery is NVIDIA only 😦

I changed from a RTX 2080Ti to a AMD RX 7900XTX

[forest rose]

Okay, im back again to see what people think about the lighting of this room. Also to ask for help since for some reason the glass panel isn't doing box-projection like the other panel for some reason and I don't know why

Also applies to the other side as well for some reason

[forest rose]

I have found the issue but don't know why it's happening. If the angle of the panel is more or less than 1' in any rotation then the reflection just breaks for some reason

[forest rose]

I have no idea what the issue is, the panels that are horizontal have just broken and copy and pasting a panel that is vertical and rotating just breaks it. Box Projection also seems to have broken as well as reflections are now inaccurate

[fair wren]

Hi guys! I honestly don't know where to put this, but I see that using the URP Balanced that Unity creates by default creates these weird sky artifacts.
weird artifacts in the sky. what could i do?

[timber lichen]

unity boat attack demo; unity version 2020.3.23; I was trying to use it instructively to learn more about lighting in unity, so I copied all their lighting settings, their post processing, and imported a mesh; generating lighting in separate project unity version 2021.3.14

but I keep getting this very light, bluish coloration on all meshes and shadows; any ideas why?

URP

[main wolf]

sky lighting maybe?

[timber lichen]

I copied skybox, lighting, and directional light settings

may you clarify what you meant if that's ok?

[polar wadi]

Hi everybody, I'm using HDRP and trying to figure out how to switch from an outdoor lighting setup to an indoor lighting setup (Basically a low poly city map and you can enter high poly rooms of city buildings). The quirk is that I'm using Trilib to load all models on the fly from the StreamingAssets folder (So that my game can be easily moddable by players).
Default lighting is made for outdoor and since city is low poly, it doesn't matter if lighting is not optimized. However for interiors, I'm stuck...
Every tutorial I saw online about HDRP lighting includes a step of baking lighting in the lighting window but since my models are loaded from outside of Unity, it's no doable, at least from my understanding. So how should I make it work?

[main wolf]

maybe the bluish tint is caused by sky lighting, try changing it to gradient or just color

[timber lichen]

thank you for the suggestion; I tried it, but it ended up also making the other side of the rock darker; I don't understand why I copied all their settings and still get different lighting

[main wolf]

Maybe you can also check if the demo use some kind of color grading

[timber lichen]

I copied post processing as well

[timber lichen]

I'm really lost; I appreciate all your help though 🙏

[forest tree]

Does anyone know why I am getting these weird dots in specific areas of my shadows?

[deft fiber]

Probably lacking up to date reflections from reflection probes

And/or light probes if it uses baked lighting

[deft fiber]

Which render pipeline is it? Are you using light cookies or custom shaders?

[forest tree]

just the standard pipeline

only shader I've made is for the display above the radio

[timber lichen]

Why do my shadows appear like this when the light has a high outer angle?

When they have a low one, they look sort of fine

and also, the shadows look pretty garbage

[timber lichen]

what do you mean by baked lighting? like generated lightmap? I used the mixed option on my directional light

[timber lichen]

I baked reflection probes in my scene

[deft fiber]

The scene may be using light probes from baked lightmapping for mesh ambient lighting

[deft fiber]

Make sure the cubemaps of the reflection probes are in appropriate locations and reflect what they're supposed to reflect

[valid magnet]

how do i make the yellow point light erase the shadow of the purple spotlight(using standart pipeline and pp)

or how should i search for source?

[timber lichen]

how?

[sour geode]

complete noob here: anyone know how to render skybox on top of a canvas? don't know how to add sorting layers for the skybox (rendered as background in the Main Camera). Also tried camera stacking but couldn't figure out how to enable skybox in an overlay camera... appreciate any pointers!

[deft fiber]

You'll have to look into what baked lightmapping and light probes are to determine if those were used

[polar wadi]

Hi everybody, would anybody know why my walls and cube don't project shadows ? I have only one directional light with shadows enable on it but the room is still completely lit...

If I lower the directional light intensity, the room does get dark, up to full dark at 0 intensity so I don't think it's ambient lighting problem

Using HDRP btw

[deft fiber]

Do your lights and meshes both have shadows enabled

[polar wadi]

Yes, even set it to two sided to make sure

[deft fiber]

Do they appear any better if you switch from orthographic to perspective camera

In Game view I mean

[polar wadi]

No difference

For the shadows on meshes, it's this option right?

[deft fiber]

Do the shadows work in any scene in your project?

[polar wadi]

Yes they do on the city map, buildings do project their shadows on the ground

I'm using the same scene to switch between indoor and outdoor models

Here is the city map for example

And here is my directional light setting

In the light explorer, it does say I use only one light so I don't think it should come from any other light

And here is the scene when I lower this directional light intensity

[deft fiber]

If the shadows work in that scene elsewhere with the same light, that suggests a problem with the meshes or camera's placement

[polar wadi]

Hm, actually, it doesn't work either in the city map, or should I say it's barely visible

After moving the cube behind the building, it should be really dark but there's barely any changes.

It's as if the shadow intensity is too low to be noticeable

But I can't find the option to increase the shadow intensity

Is it in the volume ? Or Light ? Or on the mesh ?

The volume seems to offer some control of the shadows but after playing with the sliders, it seems to affect both the bright and dark side at once, it doesn't make just the shadow cast on the cube darker.

One thing I forgot to mention is that all my mesh are loaded from the StreamingAssets using the Trilib asset (to allow modding in the future). So I can't generate lighting using the lighting windows like all the hdrp lighting tutorials show

Could that be a reason why it behaves so weirdly?

[frozen lark]

Can anyone give me some tips on fixing my lighting settings, first of all the torch itself is illuminated for some reason and is really bright (There is a point light above it)

It also appears somewhat low res even though from my experience lightmap resolution of 20+ texels should be enough (But then this level is much bigger than anything I would usually work with)

Everything is set to static and generate lightmap UV's are on too.

This is HDRP btw.

[austere tendon]

is it possible to pause baking of progressive lightmap baking? (i need to turn off the notebook the unity is running on)

[polar wadi]

Ok to answer my own question, I just had to change the shadow tint in the directional light settings. It was grey before, changing to black did make everything dark like it should

[frozen lark]

Dont think so but you can try setting priority in the task manager really low or something

[quaint coyote]

what does "Mesh doesn't have albedo UVs" mean?

[arctic isle]

In your mesh importer, check the "Generate Lightmap UVs" box

Select your 3D object file and go to the inspector

There should be a checkbox that says "Generate Lightmap UVs"

I think the shadow looks correct given the position of the light and the object

[rustic fable]

hi everyone. I bought this asset pack with shaders, and these shaders includes many time nodes. (like the fog, tree sway,...) but it seems like lightbaking is going into a loop when these nodes are connected. if I disconnect all time nodes then light bakes perfectly. Is this a bug in the latest URP?

[arctic isle]

Interesting. Can you link to the asset pack if it's on the asset store?

[tawdry lake]

Hey folks... no idea what I changed this morning, but suddenly my directional light is not appearing in my build. When I play in the editor it's fine, but my build is no bueno.

[rustic fable]

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/hextile-nature-pack-urp-standard-185057

I actually took like 2 days to figure it out xD

I was stumped as to why I couldnt bake light

Even went as far to reinstall windows haha

[tawdry lake]

thank you git!!! I moved my directional light into a child object to organize it under a ===lighting=== folder (gameobject), and for some reason the build didn't like that

[midnight sorrel]

Are all gameobjects, which are static, static shadow caster?

[rustic fable]

no

[midnight sorrel]

Dammy boy.

[rustic fable]

Well when they sway, you want the real time lighting to react, no?

Btw, I didnt change the shadow settings of the prefebs. It came out of the box like this so I thought it was all correct

[midnight sorrel]

Thanks for the help!

[tawdry lake]

ah, my dumb self made the lighting category editor only xD

[rustic fable]

Oh, you are unity staff. Thanks a million for taking a look!!

[arctic isle]

No worries, I'll take a look and let you know if I can reproduce your issue.

[rustic fable]

With disconnecting the time nodes, my level designer is able to bake light (rtx 3060) however, I still get stuck on my AMD RX 7900 XTX with latest drivers

[arctic isle]

But with connected nodes neither works?

[rustic fable]

Correct

[rustic fable]

Were you able to reproduce the problem?

[arctic isle]

I didn't get to it today, lots to catch up after holiday. I'll take a look tomorrow

[rustic fable]

I understand. Since this looks to be a AMD problem as well. Is there somewhere else I could go for support?

Maybe a radeonrays problem? (Im talking out of my butt)

[arctic isle]

Since it reproduces on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs I don't think it's a GPU vendor-related problem. Which version of Unity are you using? You are mentioning latest URP so is this 2023.2?

[rustic fable]

Seems like it does work on my AMD after waiting a long time and after disconnecting all time nodes. So the problem is def the time nodes. Since it happens on both amd and nvidia

Yes, haha I agree

[rustic fable]

2021.3.22f1

However, I also tried on the 2022 and 2023 beta

[arctic isle]

Interesting. I will investigate tomorrow 🕵️‍♂️

[rustic fable]

You're the best

[arctic isle]

Hey, I reproduced the issue with the provided assets and I'll be filing a bug right away for you. I'll get back with the public issue tracker link.

This seems like an issue with the lightmapper so we'll handle it. I could reproduce it with the CPU Lightmapper as well so defo not a GPU issue.

[rustic fable]

Thank you so much!

[arctic isle]

Good news is that we know exactly what's going wrong, bad news is that there is no obvious best solution.

[rustic fable]

I see. Does the asset pack use a bad method for the tree sway?

[slim vector]

I downloaded an office environment from asset store, it had already baked lights, from that scene I tried to redo the light baking (without changing anything) and the result was way worse

From this

To this

[deft fiber]

What do you mean by "redo", bake again?

[slim vector]

I generated lightmaps

[deep marlin]

why do lights go through walls

[stark temple]

I have edited your nickname as it's not suitable for our server.

[arctic isle]

Try changing the lights to area lights and rebaking-- besides that, make sure your meshes are configured correctly to cast shadows, make sure that the mesh UVs are correct (and that you have Generate Lightmap UVs on) and make sure your meshes have correct normals.

The lights should also be placed in front of any emissive meshes you're using to display the light source.

[deep marlin]

well probuilder meshes automatically set to cast shadows

lights are set infront of the meshes

how do rebake>

[arctic isle]

Window > Rendering > Lighting

At the bottom click "Generate Lighting"

[deep marlin]

now lights just

don't

they just dont work

i had to place new light objects

lights still go through wall

srtrange

i switched to point light now it work

[arctic isle]

Did you mark your scene geometry as 'static' using the checkbox at the top right of the inspector?

[deep marlin]

no

[arctic isle]

Please do

Make sure you have the area lights in place of spotlights / point lights and rebake. Area lights won't have the preview but they'll bake nicely

[kind mortar]

is this normal for bakery?

neverminfd

[arctic isle]

EDIT: All filled up, thanks for the help!!

Call for help: Do you want to help make lighting in Unity better? Do you have at-least a basic understanding of how to build Scenes in Unity?

I am looking for volunteers to help with user testing for the new Probe Volumes lighting feature in the product. If you, or anyone you know in your networks might be interested in participating, I'd love to hear from you. The only requirement is that you have used Unity's lighting features before, even if just experimentally.

User testing will be conducted between April 17th and 28th of April, between 10:00 - 17:00 (CEST).

During a 1hr user-testing session we provide a test project on a remote machine.
You will be asked to carry-out a short list of workflow challenges using the remote control feature of Zoom, and to speak about your experience. This informal user testing will not be recorded, and should take around 60-70 minutes.

Your feedback will help us shape the future of lighting in Unity. 🙏

[slim vector]

does exist a way to recalculate light only on one specific object?

[arctic isle]

Unfortunately, no. It's on our radar though.

[slim vector]

ok, thanlk for the info 🙂

[deft fiber]

Sounds like fun, hit me up then

[strong igloo]

my giant donut has some artefacts in the lightmap after using bakery. The only thing I changed between this and the last version to work is a limited dissolve on that mesh in blender. Generate UVs are on.

[deft fiber]

It might be texel invalidity if the sprinkles are clipping into the donut's surface, but I haven't seen this type of artefact outside of Bakery
It might be better to ask in Bakery's channels
In any case dense and organically curved geometry is a bad fit for baked lightmapping

[strong igloo]

yeah sadly it has to be baked, where would I find bakery stuff?

[deft fiber]

The store/docs/home page for assets usually has a link to forums, discord, etc

[strong igloo]

oki thx

[indigo jewel]

Hi everyone, I have a question for all of you on Probe Volume. I am trying to make a little game in unity and I looked a ton of videos on graphics because, coming from blender, I really wanted to have a "base" on how I would like my game to look before importing the prefabs, and coding everything. I saw this video for example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlxuvvYZO4Q&t=1084s . After watching this video and trying the "3D HDRP" example project I decided to try building my own scene and use probe volume as it seemed easy to set up for a nice result and ressource efficient. However I am running into a lot of problems and there is very few documentation or videos on the topic. What is your opinion on probe volume, have you been able to work with it ? Or is it too soon to try anything with it ?

[arctic isle]

What issues are you running into? We're actively working on improving probe volumes at every level, so feedback is highly appreciated.

[indigo jewel]

In closed space, light seems to be leaking a lot but as I am very new I don't really know if it is because of something else or because of probe volume

For example in this scene it should be very dark as there is no lights and no opening, however it looks like the light from the sky still goes through the ceilling and lights up the whole scene 🤔

[arctic isle]

There are some known light leak issues with Probe Volumes currently. I am not sure that it's what you're seeing here though. If you can light the scene (or in this case... not light?) with lightmaps with no leaks and then switch to Probe Volumes and see leaks, then you can be sure. Otherwise it may be normals / shadow / UV issues.

[timber lichen]

What is going on with my flashlight? Look at the top, the light sort crawls slowly away. What's going on?

And what's with this weird motion blur thing?

[halcyon trench]

hey guys, does anyone know how I can get the light level of a point/the amount of light received by a gameobject? I'm trying to make a kinda stealth system

[tepid minnow]

you might be able to use the light probes for that

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/LightProbes.GetInterpolatedProbe.html

can use that to get the interpolated probe value for a position, then https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Rendering.SphericalHarmonicsL2.Evaluate.html
to get a color from it

[halcyon trench]

thanks looks a bit complicated for me but I'll try figure it out 😅

[deft fiber]

This looks to me like an artefact of ray traced reflections or GI, as those are updated over time

[deft fiber]

This trailing is also a similar temporal artefact, which could be from misconfigured ray tracing settings also, or from TAA lacking motion vectors or something similar

[arctic isle]

Are you using Enlighten RTGI?

[arctic isle]

Either this or add a custom pass to your render pipeline that queries the lights in the scene if you only care about direct light. Alternatively, considering that your character may only be touching the ground, you may be able to unwrap the lightmaps to world space and use the lightmap color brightness at the player's XZ coordinates relative to the lightmap UVs to calculate the light levels.

[timber lichen]

Hello, I am developing a game and I have this lighting problem where there is I line where there is light and another which is black. Can someone help me ?

the light is a flashlight *

[deft fiber]

Issue with wall normal map textures, likely they aren't set as the normal map type

[indigo jewel]

Do you guys know where I can improve the pixelisation of the light rays ?

I am using hdrp and a volumetric fog

Here are my fog parameters

[night shell]

volumetric fog quality

[indigo jewel]

Thank you elon

[fossil leaf]

So I have a 2D URP project and I wanted to add point lights but for some reason there is no light or shadow at all when using with the URP 2D asset. It works fine when I use the universal one but it doesn't have 2D lights so I can't use that. All materials act like they're unlit, even in a fresh new project, what's the problem?

[compact rock]

Hi all, can I disable some objects/tags/layers from receiving environment reflections? Thank you.

[rugged galleon]

Anyone here know how I can do baked lighting with ambient occlusion WITH Shader Graph shaders? Or are these two things not compatible

Having a lot of trouble with this

[timber lichen]

@deft fiber 1 - There is no normal map on the floor
2 - I already set the wall's normal map as a normal map

[timber lichen]

Nope I don't think.

[deft fiber]

So, changing the texture type helped the walls?

[gray harbor]

so uh

made just a slight oopsie and uh.....idk what happened 😭

realtime lighting works just fine but baking just breaks textures

the lightmap 💀

[night shell]

You need to generate lightmap uvs for the mesh @gray harbor

You can do that with a simple toggle on the mesh import settings when you select it in the project window

[gray harbor]

idk chief, doesn't seem much better 💀

did some uv magic and it looks perfect now, thank's for the tip 😅

[compact rock]

Hi all, can I disable some objects/tags/layers from receiving environment reflections? Thank you.

[arctic isle]

No, but you can use reflection probes, edit the material specularity, or make your own shaders to control this behavior.

It won't be perfect, but it gives you some control. Out of curiosity, what is your use-case here?

[compact rock]

I didn't want some objects to have environmental reflections (like mountains) and some yes (like a river.). I realized I can just change the smoothness. Thank you!

[timber lichen]

no

the texture type is normal map

[deft fiber]

It looks like some kind of normal map issue, if not that
Maybe some channels could be inverted, the strength value could be wack and/or something could be wrong with the data itself, or with how the shader applies it if it's a custom shader
You can confirm this by removing the normal map entirely, assuming it uses Unity's lit or standard shader

Not sure what could be causing the floor problem
Is that a default shader as well?

[somber sapphire]

Hi. I'm struggling with getting my lightings right for an indoor scene. After baking I got those ugly bright seems around the faces. Do you have any tips how to get rid of it?

[kind mortar]

yo, im trying to port this map to another game and I want to know how to get the lighting effect on the lights

[deft fiber]

Looks like the wall is full of seams, lightmap UV seams or geometric
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/#post-8467097 explained here

How were the lightmap UVs generated for that mesh?

[deft fiber]

They are billboard sprites, though "sprites" in Unity terms
By default only the particle system supports the necessary billboard render modes

[kind mortar]

so any idea how i can achieve this?

[somber sapphire]

I tried auto generate in Unity and making it in blender. Both had pretty same results, but I'm not sure that I did the lightmap uv in blender correctly.. Thank you, I will take a look on the link you sent

[deft fiber]

If you used Blender's "lightmap pack" UV unwrap that'd explain why it's so incredibly spotty

[somber sapphire]

Yeah, I used exactly that

[deft fiber]

I wouldn't recommend it for anything
It doesn't respect any kind of continuity

So even a flat piece of geometry will be full of seams and wasting resolution into padding those seams

[somber sapphire]

Do you have some recommended tutorial how to do it properly? I was looking something, but with no luck.

[deft fiber]

A proper manual UV unwrap will likely produce good results if Unity's automatic one won't

What issues did you face with the automatic one?

[somber sapphire]

I had similar issues with bright seaems. I can switch to auto generate, baked and post a screenshot with the result. I will need a few minutes

[deft fiber]

Your wall looks kind of curved so that may be making it unwieldy for the lightmap UV generation, so a manual unwrap may be required
Still, some tips to address that will be in the link
UV unwrapping manually is more of a whole tech art skillset than just a technique

[somber sapphire]

That's interesting. Now it looks pretty decent.
Last time since I tried it, I merge it into one big meshes and added outer walls.
Before that I only had faces on the interior.
Do you think these changes might have helped?

[somber sapphire]

I probably have a commit without those changes. I will try to come back to it and look on the results.

[somber sapphire]

I got it. It looked something like this.

[lunar valve]

i use a skybox

but when i start

the sky just has a flat colour

i've messed with every single light setting i've found

and nothing hhelps

please help

:T

standard buildt in shaders

[livid aurora]

I have a 2d game. the game sometimes spawns coins in front of the screen. when I enable a new canvas, the coins are still in front of the screen but their lighting disappears. what could be causing this? the light is never disabled.

[main wolf]

check your camera clear flag setting, is it set to skybox?

[timber lichen]

yes

standart

[main wolf]

🤔 show us your texture import setting

[deft fiber]

Could be other things wrong with the texture too, such as flipped channels or something else
Anyway that can be ruled out by removing the texture and/or swapping it out for other normal map textures

[agile terrace]

Does anyone know a work around.
I want it too look like this https://i.imgur.com/ickt5Tw.png but when I add a camera it goes like this https://i.imgur.com/J7FvJfT.png

[arctic isle]

Check your post-processing settings, this looks like bloom from post-processing

[agile terrace]

Disabling bloom does help but it still makes the world glow when I zoom in https://i.imgur.com/MnokwT8.gif

[mossy pivot]

Hi in forward rendering do overlapping (same plane) surfaces end up with double lighting applied?

[hot path]

why dont you test it?

[mossy pivot]

it does for me - really bad z-fighting like double lighting - but not sure if I am doing anything out of the normal

I guess I normally use defered, seems like a bad z fighting issue

[deft fiber]

Each of them receives lighting independently, not sure what you mean by "double"
Z-fighting is expected when you overlap geometry, not sure why you would

[mossy pivot]

Yes it is limited to point and spotlight I think now - I rarely see coplanar surfaces but it can happen in my procedural stuff currently

[fervent swift]

Hi what is the differnce between the two assets?

[deft fiber]

The best option is to make it not happen

[deft fiber]

We can't tell for sure what they are just by looking at the icon here
But most likely the first one is an "URP asset" which are more or less quality levels/tiers in asset form
Assuming the second one is an "URP renderer asset" that means it's basically defining the rendering back-end features to use
URP assets can share a renderer, they can each have their own or they can have many in a list to use situationally

[fervent swift]

Thank you @deft fiber that answered my question!

[sullen lotus]

Hello,

Trying to bake lighting on a Text Mesh Pro Text with color is making it just become black.
Using the shader Distance Field (Surface), which brings the correct aspect when on preview:

But when baking lights this happens:

[fervent swift]

Why do you assign the URP Asset to the Graphics -> Scriptable Render Pipeline Settings, vs the URP Render Asset? I would assume it makes more sense to apply the Render Asset

[deft fiber]

The one in graphics basically takes the URP asset as the default quality level, I think
There isn't a very good reason why the Graphics and Quality tabs both need an URP asset
I believe they're planning to simplify the system, including to make asset/renderer separation clearer or to get rid of it altogether

[fervent swift]

Awesome, thanks @deft fiber , I appreciate your help!

[sullen lotus]

Is there any tip for fixing that?

[deft fiber]

The issue is probably that textmeshpro doesn't generate any lightmap UVs

[sullen lotus]

So that`s a Unity issue?

[deft fiber]

TMP is designed for dynamic text elements, so they probably didn't consider lightmapping as as option

It's procedural geometry so it'd have to generate lightmap UVs additionally
And most TMP shaders don't support lighting at all

(if not all?)

Instead of TMP I'd use a quad with a cutout material and a texture of the text
Or a mesh text made in Blender or another modeling program

[fervent swift]

Hi Im following along with a unity lighting tutorial and I'm wondering why this spotlight on object doesnt cast a shadow on the robot - is there a specific shadow that I am missing? I tried enabling shadows on the specific light

Thank you

[fervent swift]

Thank you

[sullen lotus]

Thanks for the heads up!

[timber lichen]

?

[fervent swift]

If a light is set to baked - and there is no baked data - will it be realtime?

[kind mortar]

i keep getting this bakery error when im baking lights

[kind mortar]

GPU: gtx 1650

[lunar valve]

thank you, that fixed it

: D

[heavy monolith]

anyone able to assist me with tattoo issues in this channel?

[kind mortar]

had to clear cache

[kind mortar]

what

[deft fiber]

I would assume only in the editor, but maybe it's worth a try

[deft fiber]

No
Why do you think that

[spring igloo]

I am having problems with baking, whenever I press generate it always finds its way to get stuck on this

Seconds left will increase infintiely

infinitely*

And I am using light probes.

Unity version 2021.3.23f1 if that matters.

[hot path]

how do i get better lighting here? something is off with the shadows... i think it would help if I had like additive shadows somehow? like dark shadows where there are multiple objects in the way of the light.. and yes cast shadows is checked on every object in the demo

and look in the trees, the denser parts of the leaves are REALLY dark compared to the rest

my ambient lighting is all bright white, and my sun is looking like this

[heavy monolith]

idk why would i think a unity help server would actually help people with unity issues..... ffs

i asked if it was the right channel for it

you didnt have to be rude about it

knock the chip off your shoulder

[radiant kettle]

I'm trying to make an hallway dark, I tried both using quads and cubes for the walls, putting a plane over it to block lights, two-sided shadows, but it never seems to block shadows, thoughts? The light comes from a directional light.

[night shell]

all you asked about is getting assistance with tattoo issues and that is it, not specific about anything else

tattoo issues about what? are you doing tattoos on a character?

and what exactly are you struggling with?

[hot path]

i changed indirect intensity btw, looks better, but id like shadows to look more realistic

[spring igloo]

After waiting it'd resolve itself and start baking, but this baking would take MUCH longer than usual, whys that?

I don't have too many lightprobes and tooo many static objects, neither is the lightmap res too high.

[night shell]

system specs?

[spring igloo]

I mean, I had the same amount of these as before, and it was much faster, even with more probes.

[night shell]

system specs?

it could be due to a variety of things

[spring igloo]

Yeah, I realized it was just..extremely large light probes that I had dealt with.

After fixing all those problems and light probing properly, I have fell in love with them lol

[spring igloo]

Okay, I am working with giant areas to apply light probes, hopefully having multiple groups won't cause any issues judging by how the wireframes link up

[timber lichen]

If you want good graphics, choose Unreal Engine 5 or 4 (if you have a good gaming pc)

because, in Unity, it is hard to get AAA graphics or at least good graphics

[timber lichen]

@deft fiber

I found something

here I rotated the floor on the Z axis

BUT

now the black square is inverted

its in the right

not on the left

[hot path]

Unfortunately im not expecting all of my players to have a good gaming pc and I also love unity's programming workflow a lot
Im not really one to mess with C++
So i want to get good graphics on unity
Ive switched to HDRP now so it should be easier

[timber lichen]

yes switch to HDRP

[hot path]

Already done

Im having some weird issues though

#archived-hdrp

[timber lichen]

but @hot path if you dont like visual scripting and c++ is hard for you Epic Games created a new language called "verse", and it A LOT easier than c++

but if HDRP works then stay on unity

[hot path]

Verse looks like they just took python and added javascript

[timber lichen]

it is a mix of c++, C, java, and c#

I think

[hot path]

I disagree strongly

[deft fiber]

This is getting off topic for this channel

[hot path]

Sure

But, i do still need lighting and shadows help in #archived-hdrp

[timber lichen]

@deft fiber I fixed it, it was a mesh problem. (This game is a PC port of a mobile game) I replace the .obj mesh in the mesh filter component with the same mesh but in .asset ; now it is fixed. but there are some meshes that are only .obj and not .asset . do you know how to convert this type of files ?

[deft fiber]

".Asset" is used by the editor for a variety of its own file types, not something you normally ever have to contend with
What do you mean by "pc port", do you not have the project source files?

[timber lichen]

I decompiled the unity build

[deft fiber]

Shouldn't you have the source if you're developing a port? These kinds of issues are not part of any normal workflow

[timber lichen]

I only dont have the scripts

I made them from scratch

@deft fiber the "WoodFloor" file is the .asset file; and the "Wood_18..." file is the .obj file

.asset "WoodFloor" file properties

.obj "Wood_18..." properties

.obj parent file properties

[deft fiber]

There really isn't supposed to be loose mesh data assets floating in the project
This is an example of a decompilation issue, I presume

[timber lichen]

no it is not a decompilation issue

its just

ok

just

ill send you something

the .asset mesh applied to the wood floor

[deft fiber]

I think you showed this already

[timber lichen]

the .obj mesh applied to the wood floor

[deft fiber]

It looks like the mesh data is partially loose in the project, some of it lacking normals, or something similar
Again not really something we're expected to face unless the project is decompiled or corrupted
But considering you said the project is a decompiled build, that seems like it'd explain it

[timber lichen]

I dont understand what are you saying

the "mesh data"

[deft fiber]

Mesh data assets should always be generated on import by this type of file that contains that data, and reside under it, because mesh assets are more than just the geometry

[timber lichen]

I re-imported it and it doesnt work

[deft fiber]

Well, you could try to re-export it in a modeling program to make sure it's not missing any data, but I can't really help because issues with decompiled projects are totally unpredictable and out of scope of game development
Decompilation is against the server rules due to this reason, and for its dubious legality

[timber lichen]

I re-exported it in a modeling program and there is still the black line

[deft fiber]

You have to make sure that the data that is there makes sense, vertex normal direction most importantly

Anyway, normals don't randomly turns sideways or whatever when you're working with proper sources
If you're legitimately porting a game, you should never have to decompile anything

[night shell]

yeah thats pretty dodgy

not sure also how this applies to lighting

seems offtopic to me

[night shell]

this I disagree with quite a bit, even in unreal if you don't know what you are doing you won't be able to achieve a high fidelity with good graphics

[night shell]

noticed your still running into similiar issues prior, what pipeline are you using again?

[hot path]

URP im trying to use HDRP now

but i took a backup so i can switch back

im gonna upload a video to #archived-hdrp in a little bit showing a serious group of issues

[night shell]

the reason the lighting doesn't look good in that instance is because there is no global illumination happening

[hot path]

i have realtime GI on

[night shell]

shadows are flat, trees are also flat, no blend between the two

[night shell]

its not doing its job here

[hot path]

well why not

[night shell]

those trees are painted on a terrain right?

[hot path]

yes

[night shell]

yep, thats probably why

[hot path]

? why

[night shell]

terrain lighting sucks pretty badly

when you paint objects on a terrain

unity resorts to lighting them mostly with probes

[hot path]

so am i just meant to make my own terrain thing

[night shell]

no, there are ways to make it look good

but in some way yeah

but to keep things simple

to imrpove the lighting of that scene

I would definetly use ambient occlusion

SSAO

since I recall also your lighting is fully dynamic, which certainly makes things harder

SSAO would help ground your trees and other terrain objects

[hot path]

where is that setting?

is HDRP a good idea or will terrain lighting still suckj

[night shell]

HDRP will be an improvement but honestly not that much of one I would reckon

[deft fiber]

Realtime GI needs to be precomputed, assuming you mean Enlighten

[night shell]

SSAO is a post process effect

[deft fiber]

HDRP could also be a downgrade if you aren't familiar with configuring and using it right
There's a lot to learn in it

[hot path]

yeah thats what issue im having atm

[hot path]

yeah but my scene changes a LOT

i hit generate lighting

but thats what it looks like after

[deft fiber]

You have to make sure you're specifically precomputing realtime GI, not also baked lightmapping

[night shell]

the problem is that as far as enlighten is concerned all that is baked is just the terrain itself, not the objects painted on it

which is why his trees and lighting looks awful currently because it resorts to probes

[deft fiber]

Quite possible, considering Terrain uses GPU instancing for trees, I think
That's something to test and confirm before trying to use it "in the field"

[deft fiber]

My advice is that you start using HDRP on the template project
You'll be quite lost if you try to upgrade, as you're not only lacking examples of HDRP features working right, you'll also be fixing stuff that broke in the change

[hot path]

does HDRP let you work with terrains and trees? also will i be able to import all my scripts because i have a lot of stuff already working

[night shell]

what usually breaks/changes between SRPs are lighting/materials/shaders

your scripts should be unaffected

unless if some of your scripts specifically mess with lighting then you might need to change some things

[hot path]

how am I meant to import it though

[night shell]

import what, HDRP?

[hot path]

the pile of scripts and prefabs and objects i have

[deft fiber]

You'd install the package, configure the project to use HDRP, convert materials, lights and settings using the Pipeline Converter
Anything else will be untouched

[night shell]

^

[hot path]

ive done that

i meant for your idea of creating a new template project

[deft fiber]

Oh, I mean that mostly just for tests and most importantly practice so you're not flying blind

[hot path]

oh

[deft fiber]

But sure you can export+import all your game content as an .unitypackage if you so wish

[hot path]

ohhhhhhhhhhhh

that could work

[deft fiber]

The new project would include pre-configured HDRP settings which may work better than what you've got hacked together currently

[hot path]

yes

video coming soon ™️

ill be back in like 30 minutes i gtg do something rn

[fervent swift]

Hi are there any common reasons why a shadow wouldnt be showing up on this baked spotlight. I appriciate your help!

[night shell]

I'm assuming you want a shadow to appear on the mesh but that mesh is a skinned mesh renderer

you can't baked skinned meshes within unity

[fervent swift]

Yes, I want a shadow that outlines the character (using urp)

i want a shadow on the lightmap, if that makes a difference to what you are saying

[night shell]

a realtime shadow?

or a baked shadow?

[fervent swift]

baked shadow

[night shell]

I just explained why you can't

because that is a skinned mesh

not a regular mesh

[fervent swift]

Ok, thank you

!

[fervent swift]

would it wrk for realtime

[night shell]

yes

[fervent swift]

ok thank you

Hi there,
I am a bit confused about shadows there are so many areas to set the shadows and im not sure whats more important light source ,or the object, or the urp renderer if someone could provide me with any resources would be really helpful. Thank you!

[night shell]

https://docs.unity3d.com/510/Documentation/Manual/ShadowOverview.html

[fervent swift]

Awesome thank you

[fervent swift]

is it possible to bake shadows entirely?

[night shell]

yes

[fervent swift]

Is that through ShadowMask?

[night shell]

shadowmasks are for when you are using mixed lighting

[fervent swift]

what if you are doing only baked

[night shell]

shadows will be baked to the lightmap

if a light is fully baked

[fervent swift]

does that happen automatically or is there a setting for that

[night shell]

should happen automatically if your mesh contributes to GI and casts shadows, and if your baked light source also is casting shadows

[fervent swift]

Understood, I appriciate your help! @night shell

[dire copper]

Hi,
My question touches both lighting and the new water system.
I have followed the guides and have the water system working, however, the lighting system is giving me quite a bit of confusion.

I have the hdrp outdoor setup
I have sun with strength 100000 Lux (High sun)
I have an ocean with an absorption of 9
A red cube at the bottom at 20m (units)
Down at the cube I have my camera, and a spotlight of 172376.7 Lumen (which is insane high)

Still I get the following result:

Could it be that the system doesn't take the water light absorption of the sun into account when considering underwater spotlights at depth?

A normal dive light has around 2000 lumen (more or less). So I'm already cranking up the spot light quite a bit.

[dire copper]

This is without the ocean

So might be still my misunderstanding. But I expected the spotlight underwater up close to be way more intensive.
I know that when I'm diving at ~20 meters, and I turn on my torch of 2000 lumen, I can definitely see the result at 1 meter

[hot path]

any feedback on this?

i think it looks better but i want feedback

i added ssao and sss

[night shell]

missing some AMBIENT OCCLUSION

whoops caps

but yeah use some ssao

[formal veldt]

idk what's going on here, I am doing baked lighting in URP. I had no lights, and everything was blank as expected. I put one small spot light and its somehow gone crazy

this is not what I expected from a single small spotlight at all

[night shell]

generate lightmap UVs

[formal veldt]

what is that

[formal veldt]

or where is that rather

I can prolly find it

[night shell]

on the mesh settings

when you click a mesh from the project window

[formal veldt]

ah ok

thanks

[wraith mica]

I'm having this issue with a plane with a water shader on it recieving shadows, creating this odd double shadow effect. Shadows seem to be casting onto the water plane and then onto the ground below it, causing a jarring and effect and doesnt seem to be how real life works too. Was wondering how I would be able to turn off receiving shadows for the water plane since I dont see any option?

[deft fiber]

Receiving shadows is done in the shader
If the PolygonNatureWater shader doesn't expose that option, you may have to modify it

[wraith mica]

yeah sadly im not even seeing that option in the shader options, you can see when i have the "Surface Options" open, theres no settings in it

ended up finding it in the shader settings, just not familiar with them\

thanks!

[robust spear]

does anyone know why i don't have any shadows/darkness at all? i believe its a setting or something i might have messed up, but i cant seem to find it

[deft fiber]

How are you lighting the scene? Baked, realtime or some other type of lighting?

The cave is lit by the scene ambient light / sky, which cannot be occluded without some form of precalculated lighting

[robust spear]

it was the scene ambient light that lit everything up, i made it work now🙏

[prime kindle]

So it costs at least a bit memory having light objects in the scene. Is there a difference in just disable them or deleting them before building? Especially light objects that are only used for baking.

[kind mortar]

having issues with bakery

[arctic isle]

use the normal GPU lightmapper 😛

[kind mortar]

i mean

not technical

you see, i've got a lamp post similar to this

and i want a spotlight

problem is, i cant put a spotlight inside the pole or else there will be no light

here

and i cant put it to the side or it will cast a shadow

[arctic isle]

disable shadows for the lamp top

[kind mortar]

where?

just turn off cast shadows?

[arctic isle]

cast shadows --> ?

ye

[kind mortar]

thanks

one more thing, i haave white spots in dark areas, can this be solved by just making texels per unit higher or samples higher?

[kind mortar]

also, bakery is much faster and i dont feel like waiting 5 hours to render the 100 lights in my scene

[arctic isle]

this is likely caused by too few lights in a large area of GI recievers or small emissive meshes that are getting samples too sparsely

[kind mortar]

soo just add more lights?

[arctic isle]

5 hours?! with good lighting settings on a nice GPU you should never go that high with GPU lightmapper

[kind mortar]

because i think it'll be fixed since this is the same area with the broken lamp posts

[kind mortar]

I have a 1650 :/

[arctic isle]

Hm... Bakery is optimized for Nvidia cards especially the older ones so I get it.

[kind mortar]

anyways, thanks for the info

oh yeah, forgot to mention the normal lightmapper is probably slower because im on 2021.3.5f1

[arctic isle]

Figures. We have made massive improvements in later versions (2022/2023.1/2023.2), most especially to improve speed / stability with lower-end cards. Next Monday I'll try to optimize the normal GPULM settings and try to beat Bakery's times with a 1650. How many GB VRAM do you have?

[kind mortar]

4 gb vram

[kind mortar]

it worked thanks

[hot path]

i am using it lol

this was back to URP btw

i would rather get HDRP working

also i tried out UE, dont really like it for a number of reasons, namely infinite storage usage, it takes literally 2 minutes for ever save even though i have a pretty damn good PC

and lots of other small issues but it does have good lighting BUT i think i can good enough lighting on HDRP

[arctic isle]

I kind of don't understand the art direction, is the ground supposed to be a desert?

[hot path]

its a snowy forest

ive been told multiple times

my snow is shit

how do I add a glint to it? and also I need to find a good snow texture but ive got LOTS of sources for that

[arctic isle]

my best guess is a very small bloom effect paired with some specular highlights / detail mask

beyond that, I think the color of the sun could be colder

[hot path]

i dont understand those, not a professional artist yet 🙂

[hot path]

maybe

anyways i dont even have my scene working on HDRP yet

its SUPER buggy

like really bad lol

i posted a video of it

#archived-hdrp message here you go, along with a list of important issues

maybe i make a thread for HDRP issues?

i think ill do that, can i include multiple messages for a thread or nah

[deft fiber]

There's no way to make a 'good' snow glint without some shader magic
Here's a how Journey's sand glint was made which is very similar to snow https://youtu.be/wt2yYnBRD3U

[arctic isle]

I don't think so but you can always link to them within the thread

I like the snow particles 👍

perhaps some frost / fog ??

[hot path]

there is some light fog but yeah

[hot path]

yeah its an asset i got

[deft fiber]

I stand what said before which is that if you don't want to be fighting against HDRP you'd have to practice its use first separately
Only then attempt to convert a pre-existing project and face the conflicts of that process

[hot path]

maybe yeah

idk

it feels like a time waste for some reason

[arctic isle]

nice! look up boreal forest for references like so and study them, like adding snow on your props around the scene

[deft fiber]

Even the basics of HDRP lighting are far beyond what you'd ever do in other render pipelines

[hot path]

most likely because its not working on my main project

[hot path]

yeah i saw a shader tutorial on how to add snow to meshes, i can try that out

you can stack materials right?

or no

[arctic isle]

depends on how many submeshes you have I believe

[hot path]

intersting, ill have to try it then

[deft fiber]

Snow is a challenging subject because it almost entirely defies all the principles that realtime graphics use for representing materials
It has no "texture", no "reflections" and it's very translucent/transmissive with sub-surface variation

So don't feel bad if it seems difficult ^^

[arctic isle]

Most snow you see in videogames looks like movie snow, kind of plastic-y and without that crystal element that makes it so beautiful. But yes, an approximation like that is enough to suspend disbelief.

[hot path]

fair but i am attached to the dream of the first map in my game being a snowy forest lol

i love snow and i love forest

so i can make it scary 👍

[deft fiber]

A non-realistic artstyle is also great for tempering player expectations towards the visual accuracy

[hot path]

but then its kind of less scary idk

i wanna get good at art anyways

because i have a reasonable amount of programming background but i had like 2 hours total of art background in my entire life before ive started working on a game

hopefully ive got the creative mind in me to make good stuff, and hopefully i can find a good resource for learning art concepts

[formal veldt]

is it possible to use specular/metallic highlights with light probes in URP?

[arctic isle]

nope

you need a reflection probe

[deft fiber]

Practice and study are important, art excercises especially
I don't want to discourage you but you're facing a lot of problems at once on the daily with this project
It's often better to ramp up the complexity at a steady pace instead

[formal veldt]

could I just like, duplicate the light probe and change it to a reflection probe?

[arctic isle]

no, you need a new gameobject

[formal veldt]

or could I like, change the lights to mixed and only use the realtime lights for specular stuff on certain materials?

[arctic isle]

yes, though would probably still need a reflection probe if you want accurate reflections

[formal veldt]

how do I make sure I only apply those lights to specific objects? I don't want to have the performance cost of baked lighting AND realtime lighting, just cuz I want some realtime effects on basically a single game object

is it possible to do that?

like if I mask it to only that object will that actually save performance or will it just discard calculations that arent on that object

[hot path]

yeah but i feel like its all art-related, meaning i can just dedicate a whole bunch of time to learning art stuff outside of my project, so i kind of agree with your advice regarding HDRP but im not sure what to make lol

[arctic isle]

you can use light layers for that

and skip the ref probe if you just need the specular response from the material instead of an actual reflection

[formal veldt]

im not sure exactly what that means but basically here is how I got here

I am using a sprite weapon, like the classic doom, but with shading and a normalmap. eventually realtime lights kept bothering me so I went to baked lights, and to make the sprite respond I needed to add light probes. and now it doesn't have that shiny look since there is no specular

most of my scene right now is illuminated from a single direction light and a lot of bouncing, is it not going to have any shinyness if it doesn't have a direct LOS to the direction light?

[deft fiber]

Why not use reflection probes? They normally go hand in hand with light probes

Rather why avoid it specifically

[arctic isle]

yeah so if you are relying on bounce light you pretty much need a baked reflection probe in areas where you won't get direct LOS to your directional light

[formal veldt]

thought it would be simpler since im only doing it on one object that doesn't need to be perfectly accurate, just convincing

I also don't have any tool to place light probes automatically so I'm gonna probably have way more than I need and im worried about performance

[arctic isle]

there is no fps/performance overhead if they're baked

same for lightmaps and light probes, you just load them from disk and that's it

[formal veldt]

well, it would be RAM overhead or something then rather than CPU

[deft fiber]

In my opinion it'd be a great excercise to make dioramas, or isolated parts of an environment based on any random idea
I learned lighting just by experimenting with basically every feature I could find, though it didn't really leave me any porftolio to show for it which the diorama excercises would have

[arctic isle]

a single reflection probe goes up to a single 2048 cubemap texture, you can go way lower and you can also compress them

[deft fiber]

Light layers probably have more overhead
Reflection probes are ancient tech and you don't need many of them

[hot path]

well that fit what i was thinking about already, do you know "I'm on Observation Duty"?

[formal veldt]

it looks like I need to place one in each room?

[arctic isle]

yes pretty much

[formal veldt]

:/ idk if I want to use them then

[hot path]

basically you try to find what changes in a few different rooms, and its sort of like a diorama for each room

[formal veldt]

though I guess I have to if I want shiny materials

[deft fiber]

One in each area where the lighting changes
If your rooms have "similar enough" lighting you might need just one total

[formal veldt]

but the walls would block reflections would they not

[deft fiber]

No, anything within the probe's range will receive reflections from that probe

[arctic isle]

no, but you'd risk some weird leaking though

[deft fiber]

Yes, that'd be a great genre of game for a visual environment designer to practice ^^

[formal veldt]

does the probe ignore mesh renderers or something?

also can you just like not scale a light probe group?

[deft fiber]

Each mesh renderer finds the closest probe and uses that for reflections

Same for light probes

[hot path]

alright, i think ill take like 3months, 6months off? to make that kind of game? but im kind of worried about running out of time to work on my main project once I go to college, and then by then it feels like the game im trying to make will already have been made LOL
but this probably isnt the place to talk about that

[formal veldt]

from what I understand the reflection probe works like a 360 degree camera, so a reflective surface can show the surroundings on it or something

[hot path]

so if you have a response #💻┃unity-talk might be better

[formal veldt]

so if the probe is in a location that doesnt see the light, nothing will see the light right?

[arctic isle]

it works exactly like that yes

[formal veldt]

and if it's in a location that does, then it will always think it's in direct light

[deft fiber]

Correct

[formal veldt]

so only one probably wouldnt work for the level

[deft fiber]

Mixed lights are required for specular shadowing like that, but then you incur that cost

Or multiple reflection probes, yes

[arctic isle]

in the time we spent trying to convince you, you probably would have made all the reflection probes just saying 😂

[formal veldt]

nah cuz in one level theres hundreds of invidual small spaces and in an entire game that's gonna be a ton of work

im gonna see how the light layers thing works

[deft fiber]

I recommend you try them both out
Reflection probes don't take many minutes to set up!

[arctic isle]

Note to self: make "auto place reflection probes" button

[formal veldt]

it would be really nice for Unity to include a way to like "filter" a volume of light probes (and to place one in the first place instead of having to duplicate selected over and over) to remove probes that are in a large area where the lights don't change

cuz as a single person team I just don't think I have the time to manually edit all the shadows in the world

[arctic isle]

probe volumes kind-of sort-of solve this

[formal veldt]

but there's a ton of unnecessary probes in that case

also is there a way to place probe volumes? cuz I only see the option to duplicate selected

and like, make a box by extruding the edges repeatedly

[deft fiber]

Probe volumes are a wholly different new system

[formal veldt]

do I have to add them to my project to be able to use them

cuz it would be really nice to just automatically fill in probes with a specific density within the convex areas of my level geometry or something

like the bounds

[arctic isle]

they're available in HDRP in 2022 and above and in URP in 2023 alpha

not saying you should use those editor versions just for probe volumes though

[formal veldt]

well the alternative is placing thousands of probes manually with duplicate selected or paying for Magic Probes

so I think I probably will

hm I'm trying to do the realtime thing and having a problem, basically the probe lighting appears to respect the normalmap but the "mixed/realtime" lighting doesn't and just lights it in a straight line

im gonna set it back to baked instead of mixed and see if I wasnt just seeing things

yea there's no "line" when it's baked

basically I'm just using this standard shader

on this object with a sprite renderer

and it seems that the indirect lighting is interacting with the normalmap of the material but the direct realtime lighting isn't

or...

its not doing the normalmap at all and it just kind of looks like that because of the directional information on the probes

[deft fiber]

https://github.com/cgaueb/light_probe_placement there's also this free option which looks well made, though I can't speak for it

[formal veldt]

hm ill try it out thanks

[deft fiber]

What does your level look like? From your description it sounds like a worst scenario for any kind of baked lighting

[formal veldt]

it's incomplete but mostly interiors with holes in the ceiling for light to come in

but realtime lights are just so ugly I can't stand using them

the problem I have is with the sprite renderer I think

when I was in the built in pipeline the sprite renderer didn't respect normalmaps

like at all

so I had to find a shader somewhere on reddit or something that applied normalmaps to a sprite renderer

but that shader doesn't work with URP it seems

which is what I switched to in order to get decals

if I try to do a regular shader on the plane, it shows the entire spritesheet at once

but sprite renderer seems to ignore normalmaps

like this looks pretty nice, WAY better than realtime lights which have instant sharp shadows and fade away in the distance and stuff

I actually like the sharp shadows in certain cases, but I want them to be overlayed onto a soft-lit area with bouncing rather than solid black

like you can't see the grate texture of the skylights because it's baked

but if I set it to realtime, you can't see the walls at all

and I don't want to just add ambient light because some areas do need to be pitch black

[deft fiber]

These kinds of spotty ceiling windows with sunlight definitely are kind of a worst case scenario ^^;

[formal veldt]

I mean it looks nice to me, much nicer than realtime

just doesn't look nice on the weapon because it's so soft

but I don't have a normalmapped sprite shader in URP

[deft fiber]

Light layers may help, but the sun's shadow casting still needs to render the environment, or there'd be no shadows from the ceiling

[formal veldt]

and this is why I can't just use a normal shader lol

doesn't even look like the normalmap is registering here anyways though

nvm it is... just extremely faint

[deft fiber]

Sprite renderer with a lit normal mapped material 'works on my machine' on 2021.3.

[formal veldt]

the range is big but I had to turn the intensity to 21 to get anything

[deft fiber]

You can change a material's tiling and offset values to replicate the frame animation, if you refer to that

[formal veldt]

normalmap is actually working though on a normal shader

just the realtime lights are weird

I noticed when I switched to URP it seemed Icould not increase the range of lights

no matter what I did, the light never reached further unless I increased intensity, which made a giant white overexposure spot where it was

[formal veldt]

I'd have to write a whole system to do that though... which maybe I will have to

but finding a sprite shader with normal maps would be much easier

[deft fiber]

URP uses logarithmic light falloff, and the range is just for clamping its maximum range of influence
BiRP on the other hand uses linear light falloff, afaik

[deft fiber]

Or just keyframe the material's Tiling and Offset properties

[formal veldt]

so... all my lights are just gonna have to look really overexposed if I want them to have any chance of reaching the weapon?

why can't you do broad soft lighting in URP?

[formal veldt]

doing that manually sounds awful

like without being able to set a certain frame index to a point on the timeline

[deft fiber]

Well, that's not really expected
URP light falloff is real world accurate, for better or worse

So it also depends on unit scale

[formal veldt]

in the real world though I've seen lights where the wall 1 inch away isn't white and yet the whole room is illuminated

like this light can't even reach the edge of this room despite the range being massive

[deft fiber]

Our eyeballs have an extremely wide dynamic range
Game renderers tend to simulate cameras

[formal veldt]

I have to make it burn your eyes out to do so, whereas I feel I did not in BiRP

[arctic isle]

that's due to the albedo of the surface, the bounce lighting, and as Spazi says our eyes

[formal veldt]

maybe I should go back to BiRP, it has baked lighting right?

for some reason I just felt like I could NEVER get the lighting right in BiRP, felt like it never bounced and it took years and years to bake

[deft fiber]

Also make sure you're using HDR, tonemapping and linear color space
URP light attenuation won't look right otherwise

[formal veldt]

I set linear color space, where do I set those other ones

[deft fiber]

HDR is enabled in URP asset, tonemapping is a post processing voluime override

[arctic isle]

birp does have baked lighting but sticking with URP is better for every other reason

[deft fiber]

I'm not sure how HDR works technically, or why the dynamic range doesn't appear to be customizable, but an eyeball simulation option would be nice
Would also be nice to configure light attenuation

[formal veldt]

HDR seems to be a bit better

although the range still has to be absurdly large to even reach the back wall lol

actually nvm

I had it bigger than it needed to be

[deft fiber]

It's for limiting the range, not extending it

[formal veldt]

however, my main issue of the weapon shader is still a big problem

there isn't any converts that convert shaders is there?

the one I ran in the first place that was build into unity didn't fix the weapon shader

probably cuz it was custom idk

[deft fiber]

No, the pipeline converter only looks up matching Unity shaders and swaps them

[formal veldt]

whats the big issue with going back to BIRP tho?

if I can get a decal shader there I dont see the issue

[arctic isle]

The birp hasn't been in active development for a while, so most of the tools there are antiquated. If it works for you though then yeah no reason not to use it.

[formal veldt]

do you know of a decal renderer within the BIRP

also for some reason it seems the directional light simlpy is not affecting my weapon at all

[deft fiber]

You can get flipbook animation for non-sprite shaders, and from what I've seen you can also get normal mapped lit sprite shaders using Shader Graph

[formal veldt]

what is shader graph

and what is flipbook animation? is that a package?

[arctic isle]

like a quad? 🤔

[formal veldt]

that has z fighting

[arctic isle]

built-in unity package that comes with the render pipelines, allows you to make shaders using a visual node system

[deft fiber]

Shader Graph is URP's (and HDRP's) tool for creating shaders
Flipbook is the generic concept of cycling parts of a texture to create animation or other types of sequences

[formal veldt]

so you're saying I could code those tools myself? not that they exist already?

I could make maybe the flipbook animator

but there is no way I'm writing a shader

[arctic isle]

shadergraph is super fun to use

but yeah I get it if you don't want to get into it

[formal veldt]

I still know nothing about shaders

my normalmaps were broken for a super long time just cuz the thing I was using to generate them had like, one number slight off, and it broke the whole thing

if I do flipbook on the material tiling though I wont need that

interesting thing, so the directional light I believe actually WAS affecting the normalmap but it simply looks bad, I guess because it's a flat shape. but point lights look pretty decent with it...

not sure how I'm gonna get good sharp lighting outdoors then

cuz it makes that ugly line that the point lights usually don't

I hate lighting ugh

might just have to not have sharp highlights outdoors tbh

[formal veldt]

hm I think I know the problem

the light probes are just a lot softer than a point light

which I LIKE for environment, but not for the weapon

I think because it's averaging from multiple probes or something

is there any way I can like increase the sharpness of the light it gets from the probes somehow?

[night shell]

light probes are softer than regular lighting because of how they work

they are almost like an ultra low resolution cubemap (think reflection probes but super low resolution)

as for increasing the sharpness, there is no in editor way for that currently (I think unticking removing ringing option could get you close). But if your writing your own custom shader...

and in that case within the shader you can apply some changes to make the probe lighting appear "Sharper" in some respects i.e. increasing the contrast of the resulting color or other ways

[night shell]

if you struggle with lighting and hate it, could just make your game flat and fullbright 😛 then you don't have to deal with lighting

but as for again retaining sharp lighting on probe lit objects its again possible, either through what I described or through some other more complex means that I don't know if shader graph will allow you to do

[formal veldt]

hm, I can't just decrease the amount of probes that it smooths between?

[night shell]

having more or less probes doesn't make the results sharper

only having more probes basically just increases the precision and the accuracy of what the light should look like at a given spot. doesn't make the result sharper, it will still be relatively soft most of the time

[hot path]

Ok id like to ask what the hell a reflection/light probe actually does?

[night shell]

a light probe is a point in space that is used by dynamic objects to sample lighting from

[hot path]

Why does it exist

[night shell]

to properly light dynamic objects with lighting that matches that of the rest of the scene

its almost always used in tandem with lightmaps

does that help explain it?

[hot path]

No not really

Image is too cluttered

[night shell]

each ball is a light probe

each ball is placed in a spot where lighting is sampled. this lighting enviorment is used by dynamic objects in the game world

those balls basically show what the lighting of an object would look like at a given point

[hot path]

And so a dyanmic object sort of lerps between those?

[night shell]

yes

as shown also with that yellow line and gizmo

[hot path]

Are they cheap?

[night shell]

yes

I believe enlighten realtime GI works with these probes as well

but generally they are used with typically static lighting

[hot path]

Interesting

Im using realtime lighting

So might not benefit me much

[night shell]

yeah it probably wouldn't

[hot path]

But reflection probes are good for mirrors

And stuff like that?

[night shell]

reflection probes are more than that

they can be used for mirrors

but in reality they should be used whenever you can

reflection probes are basically very similar to light probes

except that obviously they are a tad bit more expensive

[hot path]

Arent they expensive cuz higher res

[night shell]

a bit more expensive yes, depending on the resolution and the rate at which they are updated

if they are realtime anyway

which in your game they would be

for PBR renderers reflections/specular are CRITICAL

to getting good results

[hot path]

In what way

[night shell]

they provide the proper shine and enviormnent reflections at any given point. PBR is all about proper surface shading, and in order to do proper surface shading you have to feed it the right information

let me show an example

[night shell]

but in comparison to light probes lik ein this example, reflection probes would be used more sparingly since they can be more expensive but the idea is the same as light probes

its a point in space where the reflections of the enviorment are sampled from

give me a moment booting up unity

[hot path]

When is a render considered PBR

[night shell]

pbr - physically based renderer

to keep it simple it mostly starts with the shader that you use

and if the shader is a physically based shader

the unity standard shader for example is a PBS shader

and most of the other unity shaders now are using physically based models

lots of simplifcation and things im glossing over of course but generally thats the idea

[hot path]

Does that include hdrp lit shadera

[night shell]

yes

[hot path]

So i def want reflection probes then

[night shell]

100%

being physically based is in the name, its about using actual math and information to accurately shade materials

so material properties, light angles, and also imporantly is enviorment information

am I losing you?

[kind mortar]

Reflection probes are cool

[night shell]

enviorment example but showing you what a scene looks like using physically based shaders would look like with and without reflection probes

top one is with reflection probes

bottom one is without

now

[kind mortar]

The shiny stuff doesn’t look too good

[night shell]

here is the enviorment example with only the sky as the reflection probe

and you can see that even with "reflections" it looks wrong in this case

because the only "reflection" that is being sampled is the sky

so thats why you use reflection probes

because they can sample "reflections" from your actual scene

understand it a little better now @hot path ? or still have questions?

doesn't have to be just for "mirror like" or reflective materials

its needed also for some more diffuse materials as well

[night shell]

looking at the wooden table also which is rather matte you can see a difference here with proper reflection probes, versus without it or with incorrect reflections in the other screenshots. the color is off, but when its configured properly it looks more correct and right

aaaaaaand probably lost y'all

[hot path]

sorry i was busy with other stuff

now the question is if YOU are still here 🙂

[hot path]

yes

uh just some questions, the floor looks wrong with the reflection probe

is that just bad configuration

i actually like the floor more without the reflection probe is what i mean

[night shell]

ouch

[hot path]

?

[hot path]

yeah from that angle it looks a lot cleaner

when i was far away though i could see a lot more floor detail without the reflection probe

not sure why

[night shell]

not sure how to respond to that

[hot path]

ok

is something wrong?

your 'ouch' made it sound like you were really upset :/

[night shell]

not quite its more of that someone doesn't really have the eye for realism

It depends on what style you are going for I suppose, if you prefer clarity of textures/details over reflections that is your choice

[hot path]

up close the reflections are good but far a way it was affecting the texture quality lol

[night shell]

ahhh you mean mip mapping thats probably why

[hot path]

so true thats why i have to ask every three seconds why my scene looks like shit 🤣

[night shell]

well to pivot away and back to the original question

do you understand light probes and reflection probes now?

[hot path]

somewhat yes not sure how often to use them or how to use them though

[night shell]

https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/class-ReflectionProbe.html

for reflection probes its simple, you are given a bounding box, anything within that bounding box will use the reflection generate for that box

[hot path]

thanks ill read that later im gonna give my mind a break and do some gamin

[hot path]

interesting

[ruby sail]

I can't find where to enable Generate Lightmap UVs. Also, If I mess with the angle of the directional lighting is or add roughness to a texture, the baked lighting gets messed up. Any ideas on how to fix this?

[deft fiber]

UV generation option is in mesh import settings
Static lights and objects should not be changed after baking lightmaps
Precomputed realtime GI can adapt to light source changes

[ruby sail]

How do I get to mesh import settings? Is it possible to send an image? Also, is there a way to undo baked lighting then, until I'm finished changing static objects?

[night shell]

click on your model/mesh asset in your project window

the mesh import settings will pop up in your inspector tab

[arctic isle]

Also, is there a way to undo baked lighting then, until I'm finished changing static objects?
In the Lighting Window (Window > Rendering > Lighting) click on the small arrow next to the Generate Lighting button and select Clear Baked Data

[night shell]

also can you describe it more what you mean by your baked lighting getting messed up when you move your directional lights or add roughness textures?

[ruby sail]

Thank you!!

[ruby sail]

For sure, when I switch the texture shader from standard to autodesk interactive then add a roughness material, the lighting does this:

A similar result happens if I rotate the directional light.

[quaint coyote]

I baked lightmap this scene. It seems not all right. How do I fix this lightmap baked problems like this?

[night shell]

generate lightmap UVs

and try to bake

if you already have them its probably some other issues

[deft fiber]

Assuming that your bake is finished and you have auto-generate off, nothing can change the baked lightmap texture but another bake

Shaders can technically have different ways of sampling the lightmap, but supposedly all that support lightmapping should be doing it the same way

In this case I would make sure the bake is finished and not on auto-generate, then confirm that the artefacts we're seeing now don't show up

[quaint coyote]

I already did. but what some other issues?

[deft fiber]

Check UV overlap and texel invalidity scene window debug view modes to rule out those problems

If what we're seeing are neither UV overlap or texel invalidity then I'm not quite sure
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/ might be able to find a matching problem here

[quaint coyote]

ahh I see. Ok thanks.

[stable ocean]

hey, how would i make this more realistic?

[quaint coyote]

Why UV overlap and Texel invalidity didnt show this? Did I wrong anything?

these shows same with UV charts

[deft fiber]

Many of the debug views are valid only after the bake for that specific scene, up until the editor is closed

The dark grey checkers imply exactly that, I believe

[quaint coyote]

Ok understandable.
Can you explain these reasons? (Lightmap UV artifacts)

[deft fiber]

If every mesh has Generate Lightmap UVs enabled, the resulting lightmap UV should be valid with no extra required on your part
But to confirm that you'd have to do another bake to get to the debug views

Basically those rules are so that when a light ray hits a point on a mesh, there will be a place on the lightmap UV for the light calculation result to be painted on as a texel
(or rather, valid texels to fire the rays from to determine the color would be more accurate I believe)

[quaint coyote]

Ohhh Understandable

maybe I understood hard.

[night shell]

Missing shadows, fog, post processing

[quaint coyote]

agreed

[drowsy talon]

The checkering is displaying the atlas resolution. Oh, and btw, the ephemeral nature of the debug visualization modes should be improved a bit in 2023.1+. You're able to view them even after closing the editor as long as you are baking on-demand.

[deft fiber]

That's good to hear

[formal veldt]

hmm... is it possible for me to have an object which recieves light both from light probes AND mixed lights in a realtime fashion?

and additionally does anyone know how I could render somthing lit as if it was a single point?

basically it should be all bright or all dark

rather than having the line

I just want it lit uniformly as if only taking light data from a single point

[night shell]

yes

should already happen by default

mixed lights already cast realtime lighting

[formal veldt]

yes but it seems that individual objects only ever receive mixed or baked lighting

not a mix of both

[night shell]

as for your weapon model and the shading not sure whats going on there

are you using purely baked lighting?

and light probes?

[formal veldt]

basically my weapon is a 2d plane with a normalmap

[night shell]

huh intresting

[formal veldt]

I'm trying to emulate an effect from Amid Evil and failing completely lol

[night shell]

what is your scene lighting setup though, are you using light probes?

[formal veldt]

sort of

[night shell]

what do you mean sort of?

you either have them or you dont lol

[formal veldt]

I have some light probes but I don't like how they look on the weapon

so basically for the level geometry im using bounced baked lighting

I like how that looks

but for the weapon I like the sharpness of the realtime lights

however I DONT like the line going through the middle when it has a shadow

and additionally I want to mix in some of the light probes so its not pitch black in areas that have some boucned light

but I want sharp highligts that the realtime lights give

[night shell]

ok, whats your light probe setup for your scene though?