archived-lighting

[scenic epoch]

does anybody know what might be causing baked lights to not work in specific parts of a scene? It seems like they appear in the lightmap, but are not visible in the shaded scene

Realtime lights work flawlessly

[scenic epoch]

turns out they only appear in the lightmap occasionally

Unity version is 2022.3.4f1 btw

[scenic epoch]

I believe I've fixed the problem. I had forgotten to make sure the Lightmap Static checkbox was checked for those few meshes that didn't receive light

[willow jewel]

Hello I have the same previous problem of ligthing as the last time but sine I switch to an other version of unity I don't find this settings anymore .

[willow jewel]

yes but I still don't have the settings ?

[reef fern]

do anyone know how to fix this when i remove my directional light it goes away but when i place it back it come back

[deft fiber]

What settings are you missing
Sure you're looking at the Lighting window?

[deft fiber]

I feel like this might be a MSAA issue

[median bridge]

ok, so my item has lighting in it but im getting this really weird box outline per light, and im trying to fix it

[reef fern]

Got it fixed by changIng the skybox to solid color and with SAAA

[willow jewel]

This setting

[teal vale]

Hi guys, did anyone know what happend to my Spot light?

[deft fiber]

Can you show what your Lighting window looks like

Newer versions may have changed slightly in appearance but the button hasn't gone anywhere

[deft fiber]

Exceeded pixel light limit per object

[willow jewel]

this is my Lightning window

this is the difference between when I start directly on the game scene and when I start the game on the lobby scene

[deft fiber]

Did you scroll all the way to the bottom? Which editor version? Tried resetting editor window layout?

[willow jewel]

I was wrong I check and I am not on a recent version ... I'm on the 2021.3.16f1

And their is nothing more on the bottom of this window

[deft fiber]

That's recent enough
I expect this is an editor layout issue

[willow jewel]

how can I fix it ?

[deft fiber]

Try resetting editor's window layout or choosing one of the presets

Window>Layouts>

[willow jewel]

thx It worked 😁 👍

[dawn mantle]

heey, does someone knows why fog doesn't correctly works?

it just makes an strange halo on the road instead of making diffuse the horizont

i don't even know why those four halos are projected on the ground

any ideas?

[deft fiber]

this seems relevant

[worldly beacon]

how to fill the area evenly with light?

Point and spot light have "origin" of light propagation and have the shape of a sphere

[chilly kettle]

If you want to fill the whole scene with light, use environtment light.
If only a room, use Area Lights

[worldly beacon]

area light is only for bake lighting

[chilly kettle]

Ah you want realtime?
Well, then you have to deal with environment light or point lights.
I guess there is no built in solution for lights without falloff

[worldly beacon]

I guess there is no built in solution for lights without falloff

sad...

[dawn mantle]

Oh, thankss

[keen notch]

Does anyone know why GPU baking suddenly started crashing 2021.3.32f1? It happens in empty projects too. I've even completely reinstalled Unity Hub, Unity 2021.3.32f1, and did a clean install of fresh Nvidia drivers. All the log editor says is using my GPU then Crash!!!

[chilly kettle]

Im using 2021.3.27 and it works fine

[keen notch]

Well like I said it just mysteriously started crashing Unity.

How come there isn't an actual error? It'd give me a Microsoft Visual Runtime Error and other times just nothing.

[chilly kettle]

Did you try it with a lower or higher version?

[keen notch]

I was using a Unity version from months ago

[chilly kettle]

I think you did everything i would have done

Like updating drivers, reinstalling unity

Do you have some 3rd party assets that may cause a problem?

[chilly kettle]

Do you build light with Unity or with Bakery?

[keen notch]

Bakery?

[chilly kettle]

Bakery is a 3rd Party Asset for baking lightmaps

[keen notch]

No I just use Unity

Is that any better?

[chilly kettle]

It was much better years ago, but unitys built in lightmapper is great now.
I switched back from Bakery to Unity Lightmapper

In your case i would open a support ticket.

[keen notch]

I did send a crash report a couple of days ago

[chilly kettle]

You wont get feedback from that

[keen notch]

That's on the forums right?

[chilly kettle]

https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

ah wait thats the non technical one

i guess you have to use the forum for techical issues

[random geode]

anyone please help? i am hopeless here

[chilly kettle]

can you provide more screenshots of the problem?
Hard to see whats happening there

[deft fiber]

Which render pipeline? Are lights baked, realtime or mixed? Is there a light cookie in use? Needs a lot more info

[steady halo]

I am a super noob when it comes to lighting. I tried to bake lighting recently and it all went horribly. Now I'm trying to restore my original default lighting, but in doing so came across this:

intensity 8: 1 of 2 walls receive the light
intensity 10.4: 2 walls receive the light
intensity 53.91: floor finally receives the light

why is this happening? I feel like I've messed up something simple and fundamental to my project/models

[deft fiber]

Once you clear the generated light cache lights, lights will return to normal
It looks like you unrelatedly ran into the pixel light limit per object

[steady halo]

By that do you mean "Clear Baked Data?"

[deft fiber]

Yea, near the Generate button

[steady halo]

Yeah, I did that but still have issues

but that's fine

I have another problem lol because I'm determined to get baked lights to work

[deft fiber]

The problem in your screenshot is exclusive to realtime/mixed lights

[steady halo]

pre-bake and post-bake

after I bake the lighting, the light "disappears"

it's set to "baked," what am I missing?

[deft fiber]

Most common problem that causes this is the lack of lightmap UVs on the meshes for the light to be mapped to

[steady halo]

oh...yeah lemme check that 🤦‍♂️

[deft fiber]

You should also confirm that the lighting window reports that lightmaps do exist at the bottom

[steady halo]

isn't that done here in import settings?

[deft fiber]

Generate Lightmap UVs is checked as we want it to be
You could show your lightmapping settings and the lightmap stats section at the bottom of it

[steady halo]

yeah just wanted to confirm that first. It is not reporting any lightmaps as you said...

I restarted Unity and it's working now. A bug I guess?

[random geode]

Using the built-in render pipeline. I am now trying to upgrade to URP and it kinda seems to fix this issue but some shaders are not converting properly so i'll see about that
Real time lights and there is no cookie in use.

[random geode]

I can, but I don't think most screenshots will help understand it more clearly.
Basically what happens is that there is a strange line below any spotlight. The line is only visible when viewed from certain angles.

[quiet mango]

I think my ambient occlusion settings might be off or something. I feel like the scale of the shadows is weird.

[trim magnet]

how do i prevent this light bleed img1
is there a way to make a light longer? a rectangle even if that makes sense like img3 (im new to this sorry, feel free to ask questions)

[chilly kettle]

For Img2 -> You should use a mesh with a emissive material (if you bake the light)
For Img1 -> Depends on your Scene. You mean the light bleed on the outside of the wall?
I think this could be caused by your wall thats only a one sides mesh so light can go through, or its caused by a low lightmap (if you bake?) resolution.

[lost granite]

really dumb question but does anybody know why this might be happening

this is HDRP, the reason there are so many lights is because this scene is just going to be used for a video so performance isnt super important

this happens when I bake the lighting

im baking cos if i dont it flickers like crazy

i manually set certain lights to be baked and others are mixed

for comparison this is what it looks like when its not baked vs baked

[chilly kettle]

You mean this half circles there?

[lost granite]

yeah

its as if the baked lightmaps are being mapped weirdly to the mesh

[chilly kettle]

Did you generate a lightmap UV?

[lost granite]

i didn't tick it in the unity importer because when I do it looks wrong in a different way

ill redo it like that so you can see what I mean

[chilly kettle]

Okay. If you didnt provide selfmade Lightmap UVs from your 3D Tool you must check that checkbox

[lost granite]

this was with blender

i didnt make lightmap UVs though no

[chilly kettle]

i guess thats the issue

[lost granite]

the mesh uses a lot of differnt materials cos i didnt think I needed to bother optimising it as well in case thats relevant

okay im baking it with "generate lightmap uvs" ticked

[chilly kettle]

are the parts with the circle on meshes that you repeated/duplicated somehow?

[lost granite]

i did do a lot of duplication but not really like that

like it appears on parts of the mesh that I extruded and stuff

i wouldve thought that it would be more related to the UV mapping if anything

[chilly kettle]

i would suggest you bake it with the generate uv checked and if thats not working, write again ^^

[lost granite]

if theres a definite way to generate the UV lightmaps manually in blender i would appreciate pointers, optimisation is not important here

[lost granite]

yup it just finished

and looks as weird as it did before

hold on a sec

[lost granite]

"generate UV lightmap" ticked

worth noting that the chairs in prominent view are actually the only non-static row since they are gonna move

idk whats going on here

[dawn mantle]

Does anyone know how could i optimize this simple scene? It works not as fluid as i would like on my mobile... I have to say that there is nothing programmed yet, so all is that. Some technique i could apply to it... , is for an endless runner...

[trim magnet]

prolly a low light map ( everything is baked as its a vrc world) and ty for the help!

[earnest cypress]

Would removing lighting altogether increase FPS and how would I do it if that were the case? By removing lighting I mean no shadows, everything is illuminated like a Playstation 1 game

[chilly kettle]

Yes it would. Every light and especially every shadow eats performance

[chilly kettle]

what do you mean with optimize? You mean the amount of geometry etc?
I think its good and should run on mobile.

[earnest cypress]

How would I go about removing lighting?

[chilly kettle]

If you want to, just remove all light sources and go for environment lighting

[sand marsh]

Can someone help me with lighting? This scene doesn’t look great and I’m not sure what is wrong. I have no experience with lighting, so if you think the issue is with anything else (textures, models, etc) lmk. Let me know if you have any pointers. 🙂

[chilly kettle]

first: i like the style 🙂
I think its to bright overall.
Your light sources dont pop enough i would say.
There is a great game with a similar style, maybe take some impressions from there:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1525700/Tavern_Master/?l=german

[sand marsh]

Wow thanks! I’ll look into that. Yeah I think got mixed up in trying to add a bunch of small lights and they’re all the same intensity. Now it looks flat.

[chilly kettle]

i think it would add charme if its quite dark overall until it looks like a medieval castle or something.
Keep in mind that you cant add to many realtime lights on mobile (looks like its a mobile game?)

[sand marsh]

It is. And that makes sense. Do all the lights in the scene render the whole time? So should I worry about the number of lights in the whole scene or the density of light sources?

[deft fiber]

In forward rendering path they render each per mesh that's within their range, so if no meshes are in their range they don't render
Inversely if many complex meshes are in their range, they all render again for each light
In deferred rendering path lights only render each per screen pixel that's affected by them
In both rendering paths shadow casting lights render one viewpoint for point lights, six viewpoints for point lights
There may be an overhead cost to shadow casting light, but generally it's only as big as the complexity of the meshes within the shadow casting light's range (multiplied by shadow resolution)

[sand marsh]

I see. Thank you vm 👍

[dawn mantle]

@chilly kettle Yeah, exactly... I've already built it and even it works surprisingly fine, the mobile stills getting slow when i run it... Is the fog so expensive? how can i debug it on my phone to see what's the most expensive thing on the scene? i have to say that my phone it's not a bad one, so i don't wanna know what could happen if i run it in a worse one

[deft fiber]

The lights still need to do some kind of range check even if all meshes around them have been culled, so dormant lights will have a nonzero performance cost
But it likely is trivial unless you have hundreds of them

[sand marsh]

At this rate I’m going to have like 200 in a scene atm. But after this I plan to severely reduce the amount of lights to like a couple per room, so I think I should be fine. Plus most of my meshes arnt too complex.

[deft fiber]

As long as you're optimizing the meshes with LOD groups and optionally with occlusion culling then the lights are likely not a problem
If you're loading areas in with additive scenes or prefabs or something, you can use that to load/unload the lights as well

"Jittering" how exactly? Occlusion culling should only be disabling/enabling mesh rendering

I'm curious what it looks like since I haven't seen it before
I assume jitter in this case means it turns on and off sporadically?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/kqw54u/lightboundingsphereoverride_spotlight_flickering/ I'd try the BoundingSphere solution mentioned here

[deft fiber]

All the staff I know do work hard, but it's a big company and big engine so sometimes stuff falls through the cracks
Nobody in the posts made in recent years mentioned having filed a bug report, so you could do that
This prompts the QA team to make some statement about it

From what I recall occlusion culling often underperforms and they're looking to replace it

[merry yacht]

is there any way to save environment data like skybox images, so I don't have to reinput all of the settings every time I make a new scene?

[sand marsh]

My directional light global illumination is being received by objects that arnt included in the light's culling mask, they should not receive light on my lightmap

[regal gulch]

Not really knowing what you mean, but I think I can provide an answer from what I understand. The sun sends a massive light source throughout the entire scene.

[regal gulch]

Can anybody help me with the point light here? 2022.3.13f1

[deft copper]

Is there a setting that toggles if objects are going to have their lighting updated while the game is running? All objects keep the lighting level they had before the game started, and I really cannot find the cause for this. Can't be baked lighting, since I tried turning them off.

[twilit elm]

There is a shadow mapping part on lights which may be your problem as it maps on enable

[twilit elm]

Help with what? Sorry can't see what is wrong straight away

[tardy quarry]

im trying to make a flash light, it works out of play mode but in play mode it doesn't work any fixes? ( I use baked lighting and URP)

[timber lichen]

I love Unity's lighting

[deft copper]

Hm. What do I need to check more exactly?

[twilit elm]

this on the light object

[deft copper]

I'll check if that's on, but notably lighting doesn't update on URP, HDRP or the default one.

[jade stone]

anyone have any idea why my shadows are like this? i want hard shadows but it doesnt seem to work
my related settings are also here

normals of my object also seems ok

wait... increasing the casecade count worked... but why??

[twilit elm]

likely just low resolution on the shadows and whatever you did offset that a bit

[jade stone]

But if i have 1 cascade and my shadow quality is high that should mean all shadows are high quality shouldnt it

[twilit elm]

oh yeah probably

are there any other shadow resolution settings

[jade stone]

I sent picture of all the shadow related settings i know 😭 maybe im missing some others

[deft fiber]

The ground material's normal map is likely not set as type: normal map, or something else is wrong with it
You can confirm that by swapping to a material without any normal map

[deft fiber]

Directional light shadow resolution is mapped across the max shadow distance
Higher max shadow distance, lower shadow resolution relative to surface area
Cascades are used to split the available shadow atlas into regions by distance so you can have higher resolutions up close where they're needed, but lower resolutions further away as a tradeoff

Your shadows in the image are "hard shadows" which means they have minimal filtering, and the visual result is expected

They're still bound to the shadow resolution, they're not like the old "stencil shadows" that precisely conform to the shape of the mesh but cannot be softened/filtered

Only the third screenshot, of the URP asset inspector is relevant to realtime shadows

The Low/Medium/High shadow resolution tiers are arbitrary categories so that you can choose shadow resolutions per light in the light component's inspector, but that's that's only for lights other than directional light

[jade stone]

I think i get the general idea from this, thank you very much!

[slim vector]

I'm trying to set up 2 spotlights nearby but seems that only the one slightly nearest to the camera gets rendered, why?

[deft fiber]

Sounds like pixel light limit per object

[slim vector]

where can I change this setting?

[timber lichen]

is there any way to make light not go through walls?

For reference this is what I mean. The lights are on the other side of the wall

I'll also note that the wall is just a cube

I will also note that this is a spotlight in builtin RP

What is weird is that there are no leaks in the walls, they literally go beyond the upper and lower ones

[crude wind]

You can try making the walls thicker and/or using a higher Shadow Map resolution on the light

[deft fiber]

Shadow casting needs to be enabled on the lights
If you're using baked lightmapping and shadows are enabled, the light could be leaking if the lightmap pixels are so large relative to your geometry that they spread over from the other side

In that case you may need to increase lightmap resolution and/or mesh scale in lightmap to improve the resolution
The best solution for lightmapping would be to have the walls and floors be a continuous mesh rather than overlapping separate pieces

But I guess it's a realtime light?

[deft fiber]

Quality settings, but it's a complex issue that might not be appropriately solved by simply increasing the limit so it's best to research the topic
If you search "light limit" here you can find many explanations by me

[timber lichen]

I have thought about that

The thing about the continuous mesh

But I had no idea how to do that and went the easy (and dumb) way... lol

Anyway, as soon as Im on my computer I'll check all your points, thanks!

[quartz lily]

Anyone got any ideas of what could cause this light flickering?

Denoising Mode (on the Fog Post Proc component) was set to Both, changing to Gaussian stops it

[azure river]

does anyone know why my lights dont work if i change them they dont work and pp doesnt work aswell anyone know?

[steady halo]

How can I bake light objects that are blocked by other objects?

I am using baked lighting in my scene. I have an object that sits behind another object (a rock) in the scene. When I bake the scene, the rock in front is lit perfectly, but when I move the object as part of the game, the object behind it is really hard to see because it's in shadow. I can disable the rock and bake the object behind, but of course then the rock doesn't get baked.

[unique mango]

looks awesome tho

[radiant kettle]

Is there a way to automatically convert all realtime lights to baked ones on mobile? (or suggested alternatives)

[crude wind]

Yeah gaussian eliminates flickering but introduces some ghosting/trailing/temporal artifacts from what I've seen

I usually prefer gaussian though

[timber lichen]

Is there a good tutorial to add player customizable lighting to a unity project?

[sand marsh]

I am having trouble with lighting being transferred to my actual game build. Once I build my game to my IPhone 12 all of the cast shadows disappear. This is a comparison between my Unity editor simulator and my phone. Is there something I’m not doing to bake the shadows into my scene or is it a graphics setting?

I’m using the default iOS graphics settings, but should a baked lightmap have cast shadows?

[quartz lily]

I wish I could take credit for that, but it's from the asset store!

[quartz lily]

Hopefully with the issue being in the distance, any of that won't be visible

[quartz lily]

I'm no lighting expert, so I could be way off here.

This could be a quality settings difference. By default the editor is on a higher quality than mobile devices, the iOS quality setting in use may not have the right light settings for you.
Project Settings -> Quality -> look at the matrix at the top, the selected quality for each platform is in green

[deft fiber]

Select all light components (from light explorer or by filtering hierarchy), set all their types to baked, bake
If your question is not how to set realtime lights to baked but rather how to have only mobile use baked lights, I don't think there's any pre-existing system to do that
as baked lighting and light type are both tied to scene, I'd make separate scenes with baked lighting and load those based on a settings option
Additive scenes are helpful to separate visuals from gameplay and to avoid duplication in this case

[radiant kettle]

In some cases it's procedural so not really applicable. How about having a LightManager, having all my lights set to Baked, and if !Application.isMobilePlatform change some to realtime? (since that way the lightmaps will already be calculated)

[deft fiber]

Then you'd get double lighting from both the lightmaps and realtime lights
Assuming light type can be swapped at runtime
I'd guess maybe not, since baked lights might be stripped out at build time as they don't do anything, and only the editor cares about light type normally

Not that you can use baked lightmaps with procedural generation anyway, additive scenes or not
The custom script "prefablightmapping" may help in that case though

[radiant kettle]

You mean even if the light positions can change?

So I guess it wont be straight forward then, but maybe I can just instantiate a Baked Light instead of a non-baked one, and then does it get baked at run time or just wont work?

[deft fiber]

Won't work

[radiant kettle]

I'll read a bit more into it.. I'd assume people probably combined procedural generation and lights before!

[deft fiber]

They are generally considered a poor combination and a hassle to work together, so much so that Unity doesn't even make it possible out of the box as baked lighting is entirely tied to scenes and can't be moved
Even if it can with something like prefablightmapping, you run into the issue of discontinuities in light calculations and seams between parts
Here's one relevant talk about it: https://youtu.be/KbxiGH6igBk

[radiant kettle]

Ah ok good to know, well.. I hope all the other optimizations I did will be enough to get decent frames on mobile, testing soon, otherwise I'll rethink things keeping that in mind moving forward, thanks!

[analog lantern]

So been having issues with lighting in unity that i have never had before, when i am baking my lights, this always has happened. no lighting settings were changed, yet i just cant fix the lights. Any ideas?

[sand marsh]

I’ve set all of the settings to be the exact same for mobile and laptop. And the same for each tier of graphics. Still no cast shadows on ios mobile

[radiant kettle]

When using Dynamic Resolution on Mobile (and Unity Player) Built-In, things seem to mostly work except one thing: lightmaps (i assume) seem to work correctly at first but then, when a new scene is loaded, they seem to be limited to one screen corner making most of the scene dark, proportional to the dynamic resolution scale

This example would be what it look like of a scale of about 0.4

In-game example
SOLVED turns out there was another camera i didn't know about

[sweet blaze]

Hi, I'm having a really weird lighting problem by default

Here's a repository containing a super minimal scene
https://github.com/ensapra/Lighting-Problem.git

There's literally nothing in the scene. I created the project rn, added a transparent plane, and an object underneath, ticked hard shadows on the light and this happens
The shadowmap

I'm using built in

[night shell]

The shadows are dithered shadows cast by the transparent plane @sweet blaze

And since you have the shadow casting of the light set to hard shadows, the dithering used for transparent shadows becomes really apparent

Shadow casting from transparent objects don’t really work the way you’d expect

So there are a couple of solutions to help hide the artifacts your seeing of the semi transparent shadows, you can use soft shadows which makes those artifacts less apparent, or just simply disable shadow casting of the transparent plane

Another solution also is light mapping but that’s a whole other thing

I should note that this is only caused when you have transparent materials casting shadows

Any shadows cast by non transparent objects would be fine

[sweet blaze]

okay, i see, thanks

[night shell]

These look like texel invalidity artifacts. Use the scene “Texel Validty” draw mode on the scene tab after a lightmap bake

Green are valid texel, red are invalid. Such problems are caused by geometry that have back faces exposed (basically see through parts of a mesh)

This can be fixed by either fixing the mesh itself to close any of those holes, repositioning the objects so that those holes are not visible to the player, or on the material settings for the object with see through faces, enable “double sided GI” in the material settings

[analog lantern]

Just wandering, what could have triggered it? Wasn't having before until earlier today

[tight parcel]

hey, im having this issue with the lighting in my game. when i shine a light on a mesh, tiny lines of light slip through the edges/seams of it. right now im using a probuilder mesh to make a tunnel but im pretty sure it happens with everything, im in urp and the materials being used have the render face set to both (might be relevant idk)

[night shell]

Because your meshes are only one sided and have no thickness, with shadow maps this will create problems

Solution is to either thicken your meshes, or more simply you can enable Two Sided on the shadow casting mode for that mesh renderer

[tight parcel]

i tried to enable two sided shadow casting but it did nothing for some reason

[gilded mantle]

Could someone tell me what is happening and how i could fix this? cuz iknow the camera is too far but i need the spotlight to be rendered by the camera aswell

[glossy pike]

i think youd have to increase the light distance or shadow distance thingy on ur hdrp settings

idk ive never used hdrp

[sand marsh]

Why is this happening? I’m using URP and have real-time point lights.

[deft fiber]

I'd guess you're casting more shadows than your shadow atlas can handle
Remember that shadowcasting point lights require 6 shadowmaps each

[gilded mantle]

it was the fade distance

[brittle pecan]

Does anyone know how to fix this pop-in lighting? Second picture is moving slightly to the left, you can see the light isn't actually on it

[chilly kettle]

Try
Project Settings -> Quality -> Shadowmask Mode

Select Shadowmask to only have the spotlight illuminate the area it contacts.

[deft fiber]

As far as I understand shadowmask settings only affect mixed lights during baking, rather than realtime lights

[deft fiber]

My guess is that this may be something to do with how the leaf mesh is rendered/generated
I saw something similar when using lit shaders on built-in render pipeline's particle systems; the lighting was calculated only against the particle system's origin point

That may be because of the shader, or maybe something batching-related

[sand marsh]

Why is this lighting glitch happening? If there is more than one light the lighting separates.

[sand marsh]

So this lighting glitch is not happening when I use deferred rendering. But this is a mobile game so I was hoping there would be a workaround. Does anyone know what the issue is?

[chilly kettle]

Maybe your Light Settings are set to Vertex Light.
Try this articles:
https://unity3d.college/2017/07/06/pixel-vertex-lights-unity3d/
https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.2/Documentation/Manual/LightPerformance.html

[deft fiber]

So, which rendering paths are you trying with?

[sonic sparrow]

hi guys i've been using unity since 2017. I worked as a programmer all the time and i want to switch to become a lighting designer/programmer due to my college major(i'm physics student and it's focused on optics field). where should i begin?

[chilly kettle]

What do you want to do? Do you want to go into realistic renderings or more into mobile games etc.?

[sonic sparrow]

i'm not interested in any kind of mobile applications. I want to merge my physics knowledge and coding/designing skills to create light-based simulations, photorealistic renderings, and any kind of other applications like these

[chilly kettle]

Ok. So you have to work with HDRP lights and can ignore URP Lights.
I guess this is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqCHiZrgKzs

[sonic sparrow]

thank you i'll check it out

[golden dock]

in realtime

and baked

why is it like that, looks terrible

using hdrp btw

[sand marsh]

I have tried with the built in and I think it can’t handle as many real-time lights as I would like. So I switched to URP and tried forward and deferred. Deferred seems to be way too memory intensive for my phone. This glitch was happening with Forward Rendering.

[sand marsh]

Thanks vim I’ll take a look soon.

[deft fiber]

Baked probes only include "reflection probe static" renderers, whereas realtime probes include everything

[golden dock]

yes but ive set everything to reflection probe static already

all the materials except the tree material use hdrp lit, tree use unlit
and in baked probes the only objects it include with colors are trees, everything else is pure black for some reason

[deft fiber]

You could try Forward+ rendering path
How many shadow casting lights do you have exactly?
BiRP has a very high maximum cap for forward pixel lights, but the problem is the cost
On mobile platforms it's usually best to have little to no realtime lights, especially without shadow casting enabled

[golden dock]

like everything is full static

[deft fiber]

There's no obvious reason to me why they wouldn't show up, so that's something to look into
I'd make a simple test scene with default cubes to figure out the correct set of steps to make probe baking work and see what differs
Something that may sometimes look weird is probes being visualized in the preview with vastly different exposure, making them too dark or bright
For this reason you should have a sphere or a capsule with very smooth metallic material next to your test cubes

[golden dock]

well realtime and baked

[deft fiber]

In the second image you can see the reflection partially working

This suggests it might be a problem with the probe's rendering frustum
Confirm that near and far planes of the probe make sense for the scene

[golden dock]

yea and i really cant understand how

[golden dock]

well its all default and nothing change when i adjust that

thats what the probe exr looks like lmao

[deft fiber]

Something did change as the reflections we see near the edges here faintly disappeared

There could be both frustum and shader problems here

Hence I recommend making the test scene as I explained

[supple coyote]

Hello, I have a problem with lights in HDRP. So everything was working fine. We didn't even change anything. Suddenly the lights starts to behave like this:

reflection probes baked
ligthmaps baked
occlusion culling baked

the funny thing is, this only appear in builds

you can see the glitch on houses (they are static). It somehow disable objects/shadows. idk. Its hard to figure you because on editor everything is fine 🙂

[wet gazelle]

My lights aren't showing

[deft fiber]

@supple coyote Looks like it could be somehow related to high quality shadow filtering
Might be worth testing with medium and low
If some problem is build-specific always check which quality level you're using in editor the confirm it matches so tests are comparable

[supple coyote]

I have low, medium and high and the problem is on all three of them

high quality shadow filtering - where I can find this option?

[deft fiber]

Corresponding HDRP asset as far as I recall

[supple coyote]

this is on medium quality

[deft fiber]

That seems to confirm that filtering is not the culprit, even if it's always present at the crime scene
It could be some issue related to scales, shadow atlases or directional light clipping planes perhaps
But those are just stabs in the dark

I'd try to isolate the problem into a smaller test scene with default cubes, or to try to reproduce it in a fresh test project

[supple coyote]

I have the smaller scene I will try to fix this on these scene for now.
Funny thing is that we don't change any settings, the lightmaps and settings are the same from few months
Zero updates, zero changes

[wet gazelle]

I changed my lights to directional lights

[vale flower]

Shouldn't ADPV be fast for baking? :v

or I misunderstood guy in a video

[supple coyote]

empty project is working fine. This flickering shadows are only to a few objects on scene, not on everything

can be something with GPU instacing material checked and making static objects?

[deft fiber]

Might be
Check that there are no overlapping house objects, and that their meshes don't have overlapping geometry

[supple coyote]

ok in few minutes I will check

I also discovered something but it will be hard to explain, but maybe it will be a clue

[supple coyote]

ok so it was because of GPU material instancing

but why suddenly? idk

[sonic sparrow]

can i work on ray tracing and path tracing using unity and c#?

[vale flower]

wtf

[deft fiber]

Seems like a generic hang-up
Which editor version is it?

[vale flower]

2023.1

and yeah it hang up

[deft fiber]

That's an experimental version and out of date too by now, so I'm not super surprised if there are hitches

[vale flower]

I'm trying to recreate lighting similar to what's seen in games like Half Life and Half Life 2 (using GoldSrc, Source Engine) in Unity HDRP. I've spent two days on this, watched countless tutorials, and still can't seem to achieve the desired effect. My main issue is with exposure - to match what was done in Source, the exposure needs to be constant, right? I was considering using only real-time lighting, but then I thought maybe mixed lighting would be a better approach? This leads me to another issue - the light baking isn't giving me the results I want and I'm constantly struggling with it. To get a satisfactory effect, do I need to place reflection probes everywhere? I Want to have indoor/outdoors in one scene P.S. My version of Unity has the adaptive probe volume system.

Also, how to proper configure volume for something like that?

screenshot for example

[night shell]

a screenshot with what you currently have would also help. but honestly trying to match source 1 style gfx especially in HDRP is a strange decision to say the least knowing how rather basic source 1 rendering is.

source barely has any realtime lighting, most lighting done in source titles were all baked with lightmaps, those of which were at a really low resolution. No mixed lights or nothing because they were very expensive at the time.

Post processing also was rather minimal in such games, so exposure yes would be constant, there was no eye adaption. (there was bloom, although the bloom was basic). But beyond that no SSAO, no SSR, not even tonemapping or anything like that.

Reflection probes also weren't really a thing and weren't used that often (they were also basic and didn't use any parallax correction). PBR shading was not a thing back then so reflections were used VERY sparsely

So in terms of matching exposure not only do you have to have it constant and no eye adaption, you really have to keep a consistent intensity for all lights in your scene roughly. So sunlight intensity wise would be similar light intensity wise to any lights you have indoors

because this was an era where HDR wasn't really in full swing all the way through (it was beginning to get implemented of course, but not to its fullest)

[vale flower]

Thank you so much for your reply. I am not gonna to fully match source-like lightning but I want to look it like this.

I am noob about lightning in Unity and that's the reason why I am asking about light probes - I see that is something similiar to env_cubemap in source. But is it necessery to place them? Without them envirnoment looks strange.

You didn't answer my question - is it possible to achive source-like ligihtning only with realtimes lights in Unity?

I am asking about Global Illuminaton also

[vestal canopy]

Theoriginal Source used in hl2 dosnt have realtine lihtning, only baked. So yea you should go for mixed. And for the exposure, half life 2 has static exposure and no bloom (other then the coast levels). The game uses static reflection probes so thats what you should go for. Also you need light probes to have your objects change brightness in different lighting conditions when using baked lighting

[vale flower]

shouldn't APV do the thing instead of light probes?

[vestal canopy]

Source just puts cardboard shadows for things that move which is why you need to use mixed lightning. Other wise, non static objects wont have any shadows

[vestal canopy]

Yes

Why would you want your graphics to look like a 2009 year old game anyway? People who are using source are trying to up the graphics with dynamic lights and shadows, but you are trying to downgrade your graphics?

[night shell]

in HDRP of all pipelines as well

[night shell]

env_cubemap in source most likely refers to reflections, but as I mentioned in source games reflections were really basic and werent used that often

[vale flower]

maybe I express myself wrong. I wanna to achieve "minimum point of lightning" like source, It can be better of course. Why am I pointing into source-like? because it has some climatic thing.

Whenever I tried to do something in Unity with lightning it was looking worse than as I mentioned source lightning xd

so that's why I am asking about it

[night shell]

well its important to understand what source was doing

makes it easier to nail down what you are after

[vale flower]

I was into source a few years. And I was trying to do lightning in Unity like in source - maybe that's was a wrong way

[night shell]

yeah their lighting systems and the way you work with them are not really that similar

if you want source style lighting, light probes and full baked lights is the route because that is what source did

if you want to go with a more modern approach, mixed lights are what you need along with lightmapping

we can go more in detail of course with the modern approach

but just a little confused as to what your attempting to achieve and what exactly your aiming for

[vale flower]

Do you have any tutorials which would help me understand unity lightning and baking it? Whenever I wanted to do for example dark interior I had problem with many things

[analog lantern]

So been having issues for around 4 days now with lighting in unity that i have never had before, when i am baking my lights, this always has happened. no lighting settings were changed, yet i just cant fix the lights. Any ideas?

[deft fiber]

Original Source did have realtime lights and baked lights both
It also supported bloom and after Lost Coast had HDR with dynamic exposure (though using gamma space only)

@vale flower Source is remarkably similar to Unity's BiRP and URP (but misses most of what HDRP adds on top)
Both have a variety of realtime lights, rely a lot on lightmapping together with light probes and reflection probes

If you're familiar with designing lighting in Source, BiRP in particular has few surprises

One difference though is that Source generates light probes automatically whereas in Unity you'll have to configure light probe groups manually
Unless you're using APV but as I understand they're more of an alternative workflow you'd use instead of lightmaps, which makes them less like Source

GoldSrc also uses baked lightmaps and probes too to some extent, but they're much more limited as are each of its graphical features

[vale flower]

Why makes less like source? What's the difference?

ok finally I have successfully baked some lightning (I guess), when they are baked there is no reflections, when mixed reflections appears.

and what settings for baking should I have?

for testing and final bake

[vestal canopy]

Im pretty sure rwaltime Environment shadows came with portal 2 and after. But realtime shadows did exist with flashlights, if thats what you mean

[vale flower]

it came with episode 2 iirc

[deft fiber]

Lightmaps are textures that are limited by lightmap resolution, mesh UVs and texture compression which can give them recognizable visual quirks
APVs are interpolated points which can have their own quirks in turn
If you're emulating a specific engine's or game's signature look, you need to understand and mimic their technical limitations

[vale flower]

I do not wanna emulate, I wanna just achieve something similiar to it (not one-to-one)

[deft fiber]

Why?

I may be misunderstanding your goals here

Your "desider effect" was to "match what was done in Source" but it's a bit unclear what you were referring to precisely

[vale flower]

at least. But if I can do something similiar but also with realtime lightning it would be great

[deft fiber]

The example screenshot heavily relies on baked bounce lighting for its look, so you probably want that

[vale flower]

But firstly I must have understanding how baking lights works and my goal was something like source

[deft fiber]

As mentioned you do need reflection probes for reflections
Source used them copiously

Usually one per room

[night shell]

as a note he mentioned earlier when baking lights reflections disapeared, he means specular highlights

[deft fiber]

Quite so, specular response from mixed lights comes from their realtime part
Baked lights don't have that, but it can be approximated using reflection probes with the help of what's called "emissive proxies"

[vale flower]

ok it looks very close without any reflections

[night shell]

or with a custom shader but thats another whole ordeal

[vale flower]

yeah and my question now is if lights are in "mixed" mode, they have reflections, do I must still create reflection probe ?

[deft fiber]

(Source got realtime light reflections in Ep1, but before that there were no light reflections aside from reflection probes)

[night shell]

to correct your terminology, you mean specular highlights

you can retain those "highlights" by using mixed lights

as spazi mentioned

[deft fiber]

For reflections yes
I urge you to research what reflection probes do (or env_cubemaps, same thing)

[night shell]

you can also retain them with a bit of a hack that involves reflection probes, and using emissives to approximate the highlights

again as spazi mentioned

[vale flower]

ok but HDRP has RTX options and something like SSR

[deft fiber]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/ chapter 5 for emissive proxies

[vale flower]

it still need reflections probe?

[deft fiber]

Reflection probes are used as fallback for those systems
How about you ask more questions once you've watched this video in its entirety
https://youtu.be/DlxuvvYZO4Q

[night shell]

those are different techniques to achieve reflections, and those are usually additive in a sense

[vale flower]

I watched this video and this realtime global illumination looks so nice

[night shell]

usually it goes like this to keep things simple (and general)

[usual rasterized reflection pipeline]

• skybox reflection (360 image of skybox basically)
• local reflection probes (360 image of the enviorment at specific spots, these can also be "parallax corrected into a cube shape to approximate the enviorment)
• screen space raytraced reflections (performs raytracing in screen space to obtain more advanced and correct reflection information, but it can only trace whats on your screen)

[advanced]

• "RTX" full raytraced reflections, usually a replacement for the entire pipeline you saw from before and are accurate, and are agruably way easier to work with (but of course very expensive)

[deft fiber]

Then you shouldn't be puzzled why your reflections are missing without reflection probes, I'd assume

[vale flower]

Ok thank you so much for your time and answers

[vale flower]

One more question, how he get in this video realtime gi to work? I know that lights must be baked and in the mixed mode but what else?

[vale flower]

ok this is what I was talking about. PHysically based sky, and without reflection probe it looks like this...

Ok it was "include sun in baking"

[deft fiber]

That's not correct
SSGI and RTGI wouldn't be "realtime" if they required baked lights

You can find the official instructions here
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@13.1/manual/Ray-Tracing-Getting-Started.html
And you should also make a project with the HDRP template for a reference implementation if you seriously need it

But you probably don't

[deft fiber]

What of it? I already said you should add reflection probes

[vale flower]

yes with reflection probe it also gone

[vale flower]

thank you, I will take a look into that. I learned a lot of unity lightning here. Now I think I can make something. Thank you so much once again

[deft fiber]

It's best you start simple and learn only a couple of features at a time
HDRP really dumps all the fancy stuff on you and expects you to know what's what
Realtime GI and raytracing are really not a good spot to dive in, and really not necessary for most games, even with cutting edge graphics

[vale flower]

yeah because it's so expenesive

[deft fiber]

And complex to set up, which matters most in this case

Honestly you should be using BiRP or URP, especially if Source levels are your reference

[vale flower]

I will stay in HDRP because I wanna use things like water. But thanks for an advice

[zinc flume]

Are there any plan to handle/mitigate light leaking of APV? Left side is lightmapped, Right side is APV.
The capsule is dynamic object....

[vale flower]

are you sure about that that's apv issue? @zinc flume

[zinc flume]

yes. light leak through thin wall because both side of the probe is valid. but both side contain polarizing exposure. I could maybe make a touch up volume to fake thick wall but I'll rather not do that on every wall I have in my game

Also, my screenshot contain geometry that is not axis aligned with the world, that might be hard for APV as well...

[vale flower]

how thick your wall is ?

[zinc flume]

0.15m if I remember correctly

[vale flower]

I don't know, I wanted to replicate your case but it always is shaded properly and there is no leaks

[zinc flume]

What's probe spacing did you use. I was using 0.5m in my image.

And this is 0.75m probe spacing

[vale flower]

default one

Ok I see where your problem is propably

upscale your shadowmap resolution

tried even on probe spacing 5m and it is not leaking while I have high shadowmaps

[zinc flume]

‼️

Will try after work. Thanks.

[zinc flume]

also, might I ask which version of Unity are you using?

[vale flower]

2023.2.0f1, also I am using raytraced shadowing but I turned it off to check it. When you are using low as f lightmaps and have raytraced shadowing on, problem still disappears

[zinc flume]

This is wild find out if it's true. and might be the reason why I could never get APV to not leak as I have never considered shadow map to be related to its leaking AT ALL.

So most of the time when leak happen I just mess with the probe setting and volume options.

[vale flower]

take a point that your directional light is mixed/realtime so I don't know if APVs have to do something with it
(I am noob in lightning too)

But I noticed that when I was checking it have nothing to do with mixed/realtimes lightning

[clever hedge]

I have some problem with baking lights on Unity.
In substance I have done all the UV, baked the texture and all is good.
I set all in Unity and when I bake it's all corrupted? I have only a directional light and the whole GameObject is set to static.

I'm using URP
How could I fix it?

[vale flower]

It happens only after baking light?

[deft fiber]

@zinc flume APVs have a bunch of options, manual and automatic for adjusting probe position and sampling to reduce leaking issues
They are shown in this talk https://youtu.be/iU7X5xICkc8?t=538

@clever hedge Unity's lightmapping uses the second UV channel for lightmap UVs, which to work correctly must be set up with some specific rules that ordinary UVs don't have
Unless you have your own authored lightmap UVs in the second channel, you should enable "generate lightmap UVs" in mesh import settings

Mainly the rules are there must be no overlap, there must be proper padding relative to lightmap resolution and all UV islands must be within normalized UV coordinates

[supple kelp]

there are so many games that try to go for a retro look though. like old playstation graphics and such. and pixel art too for example. why are you surprised about this?

[supple kelp]

source doesnt actually have you manually placing light probes like in unity. so i guess unity is worse than a game engine from the 90s in that regard. in unity you have to waste time placing light probes.

like, you have to spend time filling each room with like 50 light probes? and if it's a big open area then you're gonna need to place hundreds of light probes in it? maybe thousands even?

there has to be a better way

[clever hedge]

Thank you, now I'll try to create a second channel for UV on Substance and try to reimport on Unity

[deft fiber]

Or just enable auto generation
Costs no effort and it's usually perfectly good enough

[deft fiber]

Adaptive Probe Volumes are the "better way"

[supple kelp]

why is this video using light probes then? look at the amount of light probes at 15:24, did he manually place them? or are those the adaptive probe volumes

17:29 is even worse, there's like 10k on the screen at once

10k light probes in that one area

[deft fiber]

They're manually placed light probes

15:35 Probe volumes```

Probes aren't that slow to place manually, as you can box-select many, duplicate and drag to quickly get a huge 3D grid of them, then delete or move the ones that are in bad spots

There are also scripts to automate that process

[deft fiber]

APVs are supposedly optimized enough to handle that

[supple kelp]

oh ok, probe volumes seem a lot easier to place. cause manually placing thousands of light probes seems like an impossible task. even if you can drag quickly, rooms arent always squares but very complicated shapes so you'll have to do a lot of work to fill them up properly.

so whats the advantage of using light probes instead of the volumes?

[deft fiber]

They're an older, simpler system so they may be quicker to set up in simple situations and probably work better with older hardware
Whereas APVs are a newfangled thing still in active development, and not just a component but a whole toolset

APVs are also meant to replace lightmapping afaik, which normally works in tandem with light probes

[supple kelp]

i looked APVs up on google and it seems like they're not for the built in render pipeline? its the one i use because i heard it's the best and i'm not looking for photorealism or anything

[paper glade]

hi guys, i have a random generated maze system, how do i bake the lighting during runtime?

[deft fiber]

APV is one of SRP-exclusive features
HDRP gets the newest versions of APV as it's being developed, and URP also has it in somewhat limited form but feature parity is probably the goal
BiRP is not particularly better (nor worse) than HDRP and URP, and HDRP doesn't lock you into photorealism (although its tools are made with that in mind)

[paper glade]

all the objects are instantiated when the player loads in the new scene, so the lighting has to bake again, how do i achieve this?

[deft fiber]

You don't

[paper glade]

what do i do then?

[night shell]

Real-time lighting

[paper glade]

where do i activate that?

[night shell]

It should be active by default when you create lights

The modes are set on the lights themselves

[paper glade]

i see

thx

[night shell]

Also not sure why it wasn’t mentioned but there are tools and scripts that exist where they make the process very simple and automate the placement of light probes for an entire scene

[supple kelp]

i want to ask, is BiRP perfectly capable of visuals of both DUSK and super mario odyssey? two completely different artstyles and im wondering if BiRP can accomplish them easily.

[night shell]

With some work, yes

[supple kelp]

i've heard posts about people wanting built in to be deprecated, is it really gonna be deprecated in the near future? cause it sounds like there's nothing wrong with it. and its not like urp and hdrp are straight up better.

[night shell]

As far as I know not really, but a lot of projects I know do use them still. URP still does not have feature parity with BiRP yet despite how hard they are pushing everyone to use it. Personally I would avoid both render pipelines because they are constantly changing. BiRP is rock solid and has been battle tested, and has the most resources available for it

[deft fiber]

HDRP is straight up better if you want HD graphics
URP is better if you want modern features and ease of use
BiRP is still good if you want to tap into a decade of user created assets and resources

I believe the decision to modernize the render pipelines was mostly because BiRP is built upon legacy code upon legacy code so making updates for it became too cumbersome

[night shell]

Despite that I find it still works very well

[deft fiber]

Implementing something like the SRP Batching would've required a rewrite of the rendering engine anyway

[night shell]

It’s up to you, you can always create a project and do some tests with each pipeline and see what you prefer

[deft fiber]

At current point in time URP is lacking only a few of BiRP's features, and surpassing it in other areas

[supple kelp]

what areas does it surpass birp in?

[deft fiber]

Still, if you're making your own rendering features and your own optimization under the hood, you won't miss URP really

[deft fiber]

It has SRP Batching, VFX Graph, now APVs, Forward+ rendering path, colored light cookies, higher quality shadow filtering are ones I've encountered
Light and shaders generally seem to be of higher quality, like per-pixel lit particles, more blend modes out of the box
Both have Shader Graph but URP gets more robust native support

https://docs.unity3d.com/2023.3/Documentation/Manual/render-pipelines-feature-comparison.html
Here's the full list

The most notable thing that's missing is Screen Space Reflections
The new URP sample scene implements them but they're not a documented feature

[supple kelp]

hmm ok, but what is the difference in performance? if someone's playing my game. will urp be more heavy on their pc, or is there any difference at all?

[novel onyx]

hey is there any reason why the black void appares when I switch my additional links from per vertex to per pixel?

[vestal canopy]

you see, the thing is... he is using hdrp. using hdrp to imitate source dosnt really make sense.

[deft fiber]

URP is supposedly lighter but real world reports vary both ways
Obviously also depends a lot on the game's graphics features and what kind of optimizations you're using
With BiRP you're usually doing a lot of work to reduce draw calls using types of batching and instancing but SRP batching makes that unnecessary
So while the performance might be the same in ideal conditions, it does save some effort

URP's SSAO that's enabled by default probably takes up more frame time than all the other rendering combined which can skew the results sometimes

But it always depends
If you have a lot of lights, forward+ rendering path can reduce their cost significantly
In that case it may be possible to match the performance by limiting light ranges and slicing meshes, but it's nice to not have to you know

With all render pipelines it'd be best to work to their strengths rather than try to put them up in a one to one comparison
SRPs are smoother to use out of the box, but BiRP is much more expandable due to being picked apart for years by the community

[supple kelp]

thanks for the explanation. its hard to choose between birp and urp for sure

[deft fiber]

The trick is to become a diehard one for one render pipeline so the grass is never greener on the other side of the fence 😉

[supple kelp]

what if i become a birp diehard and it gets deprecated? i recently saw some urp fans on the forums raising pitchforks demanding birp to be deprecated for some reason

[deft fiber]

That's even better as you can feel righteously bitter and complain forever, as nostalgia only makes it shine more with each passing year

[night shell]

usually when something gets deprecated in unity in my experience, it still stays within the editor it just has a deprecated tag

[night shell]

birp fanboy here 😛

i've been against render pipelines for a long while though, like BiRP as I mentioned is mostly untouched now but its been with unity since the beginning

and its been used on all kinds of games that have shipped, arguably its the most battle tested/hardened out of all the other render pipelines

vs with the others they are still very new but are constantly changing

[deft fiber]

Yeah, deprecating it will be more of a formality until it naturally becomes incompatible with one of the newer editor versions
Even still we can expect old editors to stay available and work just as they did back in their day

[paper glade]

when i have a light on my ceiling

it can't be batched

why is this?

[deft fiber]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/forward-lights-break-static-batching-but-why-custom-shader-lighting.1488873/

[paper glade]

i fixed that, but now i have a new issue

so the only problem are the point lights rn

i've put my camera rendering to deferred

and my point lights all take up like 400 batches

disabling shadows brings this number down to like 70 batches

[deft fiber]

Shadow casting?

[paper glade]

i guess yea

[paper glade]

this is not normal right?

[deft fiber]

Each shadow casting point light must render 6 shadow casting passes that include all meshes within its range
Deferred rendering can't help with that

[paper glade]

when i disable deferred rendering, i get like 3k batches

[paper glade]

idk what i can do tbh

if i just get rid of all the lights, my batches are fine

[deft fiber]

There's a reason why even triple-A games avoid having a lot of dynamic lights, and avoid shadow casting point lights in particular

[paper glade]

so, what kind of lights do i use then?

i need ceiling lights

cuz i tried this as a test version

[deft fiber]

Baked lightmapping could be applicable
Prefer shadowless point lights, and spot lights for shadow casting

[paper glade]

everything is generated at runtime

like, the map gets instantiated as soon as the player warps to the new scene

[deft fiber]

To some extent baked lights could be used by loading level parts as additive scenes with a specified offset, or by attaching baked lighting to prefabs using a custom script

[paper glade]

yeah, i was thinking of adding a loading screen and letting the map generate, then bake the lights?

[deft fiber]

But if you're stuck with realtime lighting you need to get clever
For example if you need shadows from a lamp you could have a spot light facing down, and another shadowless spot light facing up right below it to mimic soft bounce lighting

[deft fiber]

Can't bake at runtime

[paper glade]

fk

[paper glade]

but just, point lights add waaayyyyy too many draw calls

[deft fiber]

While I don't recommend swapping render pipelines mid-project, if you're using URP or HDRP you can rely on SRP Batching which eliminates the need to wrangle draw calls

[paper glade]

i don't use any pipeline

just have default

[deft fiber]

Still, only use shadow casting lights where absolutely necessary and prefer spot lights whenever possible

[paper glade]

basically what i want is, something like this, one sec

like 1 big room

and 1 light under each ceiling tile

but that uses way too many lights

but i know its still possible

but idk how i should handle this

[night shell]

lighting with procedual generation is probably one of the hardest things you can do

unfortunately

[paper glade]

yeah i see

and i've noticed

[night shell]

and most of the techniques fly out the window

[paper glade]

but this is just a maze generated, it doesn't generate more maze when going to the barrier

[deft fiber]

It's a worst of both worlds scenario even if you don't have draw calls to worry about

[paper glade]

so there is nothing i can do about it?

[night shell]

you can technically utilize baked lighting to light procedual worlds, although its difficult to explain

but this was done in a title done by bethesda which I forget

[paper glade]

oh

[deft fiber]

You could consider this workaround

[night shell]

but essentially the game was procedual, but enviorments were preset and baked before hand

and were essentially stiched in such a way where they appeared seamless

[deft fiber]

Blades: https://youtu.be/KbxiGH6igBk
But this is pro stuff

[paper glade]

even, when i turn off all shadows on all point lights, i still have 500 batches left

from those lights

[night shell]

you can probably write some additional code to handle culling of lights

if lights or such are occluded disable them

[night shell]

same with meshes as well

[paper glade]

500+ draw calls in there

all from the light

[deft fiber]

Batches /draw calls aren't the end all be all of optimization
The 6 shadow casting perspectives per light are expensive

[paper glade]

is there a way to reduce that number?

[deft fiber]

Use spot lights or disable shadow casting on point lights, as I've suggested a few times

[night shell]

you can disable shadow casting (and even lower shadow resolutions of lights) with basic distance checks

essentially LOD'ing for lights

[paper glade]

how do i disable shadow casting?

i only put the "Shadow Type" to "No Shadows"

[deft fiber]

Yes, this disables shadows

[paper glade]

but then still, 500+ batch calls

that's normal?

[deft fiber]

Something to note is that the stats window you're looking at is known to be inaccurate

If you want precise information you should be using the frame debugger

[paper glade]

yeah, i use that

there are still like 500+ draw calls in the RenderDeferred.Light dropdown

some have keyword "POINT UNITY_HDR_ON"

most of them

[deft fiber]

I would expect that deferred rendering doesn't need a lot of draw calls but I'm not familiar how it works in the built-in render pipeline

[paper glade]

and others are stuff like this

[paper glade]

i see

do you recommend switching to another pipeline?

does it have benefits?

i had another project where i switched to URP and all my shaders were pink and couldn't fix it

well, only if i assigned the right texture back to each object

which took me hours

[deft fiber]

Not usually mid-project, and not without version control as it often requires irreversible changes

[paper glade]

yea

true

[deft fiber]

I was listing them earlier here: #archived-lighting message

[deft fiber]

There's an automatic converter for Standard and other built-in RP's default shader which you should be using

[paper glade]

yeah i used that, but it didn't work back then

always errors

so i did it manually

anyways, thanks for the help man!

i guess im just gonna spawn lights randomly

[night shell]

I would also look into ways you can cull lights

[deft fiber]

Yea, or the meshes
Lights don't do much unless they're lighting something

[paper glade]

alright, thanks

[night shell]

I've already suggested a basic way you could cull lights by reducing shadow resolution (and disabling shadows) based on distance, and you can do something similar with meshes too by reducing the amount of them drawn on screen by distance, or by other more advanced techniques

the less there is, the better

[golden dock]

have anyone tried making light culling system that works with distance? i have thousands of lights in my scene and it needs to be optimized, i guess unity doesnt have such function by default so

also is there a way to prevent this look

lightning gets extreme brighter on objects that are close to light but this is not what i want

[tulip tendon]

usually to optimize i play around with shadow cascades cuz those are performance killers in lights, the rest just add LOD's and play with the draw distance, add some fog, occlusion culling

[tulip tendon]

i mean...thats how light works, just decrease the intensity or range

[golden dock]

how do i play with the draw distance of lights? i think thats exactly what i need, shadows already turned off

[golden dock]

yeah but its like too harsh, not like that in other engines i used idk

[tulip tendon]

what render pipeline are you using?

[tulip tendon]

i ment camera draw distance

[golden dock]

hdrp

there are more lights than the amount unity supports so i have a lot of flickering and it looks horrible

[tulip tendon]

for the flickering set the render path to deferred, it gets rid of light limits

HDRP should be on deferred by default

[golden dock]

it didnt

extremely annoying

[tulip tendon]

is it the same in game view?

[golden dock]

oh its normal in game view

but im not making a game, making a mod for some other game

i hope it will be normal there too

[golden dock]

uhh thats what i meant

looks really bad

[tulip tendon]

i had this issue with realtime lights on URP as well also on deferred, it was only happening in scene view, not game view it might be just an optimisation thing unity does for scene view

[tulip tendon]

just turn down the intensity

[golden dock]

but then it wouldnt be bright enough for road

[tulip tendon]

do you have any indirect lighting in the scene?

[golden dock]

now this is what happens on game view

[golden dock]

whats that? u mean like directional light?

[tulip tendon]

by default, lights only give direct lighting

meaning light that comes directly from the source

indirect lighting is light that comes from bounces of objects

lemme get some examples

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/792509947157020684/1167581543615692880/image.png?ex=6573900c&is=65611b0c&hm=75ff47cb5b2bc6f12524f1a335fe997ec5be5570c506182b29c09fd1d01ef452&=&format=webp&quality=lossless

this is only direct lighting

[golden dock]

oh i see what u mean now, but nah i dont think this scene has it

[tulip tendon]

this is with indirect lighting

[tulip tendon]

in this case i use SSGI to simulate realtime indirect lighting

but screen space GI relies on screen space data

meaning if the light is not in your camera view no indirect lighting will be calcluated

thats where raytraceing comes in but thats into the expensive lighting territory

so in your case you can try using SSGI combined with APV's

also add some LOD's to your scene

from that video you sent i can see the street lights are still there when very far from the camera

the street lights that are far like this can be culled and improve performance

[rose birch]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/534472776841691137/1179781662477914142/image.png?ex=657b084b&is=6568934b&hm=369b3d29992cf15aa1af63b80897b6200c9e1e04d4a5f57210d7ea67aa6003e9&

(using bakery)
I just cant seem to be able to get rid of this artifacting

looks fine in the preview

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/534472776841691137/1179782028934267003/image.png?ex=657b08a2&is=656893a2&hm=a183f0203c576b32a295ef151d3ce35fed6502ee12b00b165badea7099f99c15&

[tulip tendon]

looks like lightmap UV issues

[rose birch]

how does one go about making your own then

since unity cant generate it correctly i think

[tulip tendon]

blender

or any other 3D modeling software

[rose birch]

is there a good tutorial to use

[tulip tendon]

i dont know any specific ones, go on youtube and search for one

[chilly kettle]

Unity generates good Lightmap UVs if you dont fck up the values 😄

[rose birch]

results are the same no matter what i set here

been messing with the values all day, default included

[zinc flume]

Coming back to this, nope increasing shadow resolution didn't help. and you can see the sampling debug here showing that apv sampling from the other side of the wall

and if you want my geometry set up

[zinc flume]

The more I test apv, the more I'm convinced that this tech needs serious fix for light leaking before Unity should even consider basing precompute gi on this leaking mess. Why is Unity trying to push it so much when it can't even handle simple setup. 🤔

[vale flower]

added your scene, added light and it is not leaking.

as I mentioned it is not APV issue

[zinc flume]

So I will have to try with Unity 2023.2 later then

Although I am quite sure of what is happenning, since the probe sample debugger cleary show that it's leaking. Might as well not waste any more time

[misty hearth]

Hi. What is the best way to do 2d shadows and stop this from happening? I'm using Shadow Caster 2D and it doesn't seem to work very well

[river hedge]

im just getting started with lighting, and i added a couple of lights to my scene, but baking produces weird artefacts. what am i doing wrong here?

[uneven grotto]

im using real time directional light lighting in URP, but it looks awful and generates in strips, how can i make it smoother?

[chilly kettle]

I guess your Mesh doesnt have Lightmap-UVs.
You should also show us the settings of the bake.

[chilly kettle]

did you check the "shadow resolution" options in your pipeline asset > rendering?

[uneven grotto]

yes, i put the resolution on the maximum 4096

i did some changes with the cascade and it now looks fairly good, but theres still the odd stuttering when the lighting moves and it has to generate more shadows. Can this not be changed to be smoother?

[chilly kettle]

Dont know what you mean

[uneven grotto]

ill record a video, one sec

[uneven grotto]

you can notice the stuttering when the lighting updates

theres lots of strips of shadow that seem to generate when the lighting updates which causes it. Im not sure if that can be fixed or thats just how the shadow works and cant be changed

[chilly kettle]

how big is this "gameboard" in unity units?

[uneven grotto]

Each tile is a cube, 10 by 10 1 height

And it’s a 5x5 grid

[chilly kettle]

so its 50x50 Units?
How does it look if you shrink it to 5x5?

[uneven grotto]

I’ll test it

[deft fiber]

Did you watch the video I linked you
It included multiple solutions to APV light leaking

[zinc flume]

I try all of that.
1.Virtual offset doesn't work here because there is no probe inside geometry
2.Probe touch up volume with invalidate probe setting work on the top ceiling, but not the side wall and result in sampling splotch
3.view bias /normal bias doesn't help

also, invalidating probe just make the lighting data on the area getting lost

[deft fiber]

This is a result of too many overlapping lights in forward rendering
You'd have to confirm that you're able to use deffered rendering
The light intensity issue can't be easily remedied, as HDRP is built around real-world accurate logarithmic light attenuation
It can be remedied with a tonemapping profiles to lessen the contrast between light and dark in HDR space
There's no built-in light culling system, but you could use any system that you use for culling/loading in gameobjects in general
Lights that affect no meshes don't do any light calculations, and in deferred rendering lights that can't be seen aren't rendered

[deft fiber]

This is kind of an unsolveable problem but as long as the resolution is high and soft shadows are enabled it may be acceptable
Using cascades doesn't make sense with orthographic camera, as all distances appear equally close
For this reason it's important that your directional light shadow max distance is as low as it needs to be, and camera's near plane is as high as it can be

It doesn't look as good as I'd expect from a 4K shadowmap so maybe the resolution is being wasted on incorrect distance

[chilly kettle]

isnt the size of the gameobject a reason?

[deft fiber]

Only relative to shadow resolution and shadow distance
The actual math is more complex but it's helpful to think that the shadow's resolution is mapped up to the shadow distance
So basically if your scene fits within a shadow distance of 100 you're getting all 4K shadows across the level
If your level is only 10 units long in this example, it'd be getting a fraction of the shadowmap and appear with low resolution shadows
If shadow distance is decreased to 10, the shadows should appear just as accurate again as they did with big level and long shadow distance

I think the resolution is spread starting from camera plane, but I haven't confirmed that specifically
Usually camera near plane is very close to the camera but with an ortho camera it's important to check there's no wasted empty space there

[deft fiber]

@uneven grotto Oh and to fix the "strips" you may be able to rotate the directional light around it's forward axis, which realigns the pixel grid of the shadowmap
It may cause strips elsewhere, but it can be a good compromise
When the directional light turns, it may be worth trying to also rotate it in this way to kind of obfuscate the pixel shimmering that you see otherwise with a moving sun

You definitely need soft shadows enabled for that though

[uneven grotto]

I’ll try all of this thanks, and soft shadows is on

[golden dock]

how can i confirm that? i mean like its already set to deferred so
and also how could i do those tonemapping stuff to improve lightning to my liking
and for the last thing, so would occlusion culling do the job for light culling?

[deft fiber]

HDRP has settings in many places so you may have to snoop around for all the necessary ones, can't say more precisely
Tonemapping is a volume override, where you can find other post processing overrides as well that may be useful
Tonemapping requires HDR and linear color space but HDRP by default has all those
Anything that culls meshes will reduce the cost of light, but I think occlusion culling specifically also removes lights

[uneven grotto]

i changed the angle so the sun has no angle its just facing straight down and that strips are gone. But the stuttering still occurs. Maybe its jus the way im handling the day night cycle. Ive basically got 2 directional lights as a child of an empty game object, and that game object rotates

maybe the rotation isnt smooth and its not actually a lighting issue

[deft fiber]

It's because of how the directional light shadow fundamentally works, as I said it's kind of unsolveable

But might be mitigated with the steps I detailed

[uneven grotto]

dam. I guess how ill leave it as is, and slow down the rotation so its less noticable

thanks for all the help though

[deft fiber]

Most importantly you should go through your shadow settings as I explained
The best cure is to improve shadow resolution which in your case might be held back by incorrect settings

[uneven grotto]

i think ive already done those but ill check

The shadow res is on the highest 4096, and ive lowered the distance to 60 which is the lowest in can go before the shadows are cutoff

[deft fiber]

That's good
I'd set cascade count to 1 as it may be distorting our results
And then check if increasing the near plane of the camera the same way you decreased the shadow distance has a positive effect

[uneven grotto]

alright sweet

[uneven grotto]

the near plane is currently on -50, increasing it to like -40 or -20 doesnt really seem to have any effect on the shadows, and further than that clips through the actual scene

[deft fiber]

I guess it might not be the starting distance of shadows then
Maybe not an issue but my conventional wisdom states that near planes should not be negative, instead you would move the camera backwards that much

[uneven grotto]

alright sure ill try it

[deft fiber]

If the camera/near plane is as close as they can be, I guess the conditions should be ideal

[uneven grotto]

yeah doing this just achieves the same thing no difference to the shadows. Ill just try to keep it as subtle as possible

[compact rock]

Hi all, I am having a issue with URP lighting. For some reason, it becomes all fucked up when it finishes baking (one without the emission).

Does anybody have any idea what the problem here is?

Nevermind, figured it out.

[deft fiber]

What did it turn out to be

[compact rock]

Lighting compression

[dusty warren]

Hi all - I originally joined this discord to ask for help with a shader but while taking a screenshot to explain the goal I've noticed a different problem that I've spent half an hour failing to resolve

on the left is a reflective sphere, with reflections from a reflection probe in the center of the chain-link-box-thing

on the right is a reflective sphere somehow recieving reflections from an old version of the reflection probe that no longer exists

for some reason, everything in this scene not within the range of a specific reflection probe has this reflection, with the (no longer existing) red spotlight

even if I delete every single reflection probe in the scene I still get this reflection

how do remove this ghost reflection probe and make it so that every object in the scene not within the range of a reflection probe that exists just reflects the skybox?

[dusty warren]

update: this was fixed by clearing baked lighting

[thin zephyr]

If i use "Directional Lighting" on BiRP, my batches goes from 250 to 500 + is this just the way lighting works? it doubles the batches? or is there other ways to not double my batches and still light my scene (like i guess not using Directiona lighting?)

im generating a map realtime so i don't bake anything, i just use my 1 realtime light

[deft fiber]

Kinda is the way it works
Objects hit by a light have to be rendered again to get the effects of that light

[thick lodge]

Hi. My lights is not working in builded game. In editor it works perfectly. I have quality on ultra.

[sudden leaf]

Does anyone know why my baked lighting isn't visible? Baked GI is checked, there's a lightmap created, everythng seems to be ok, they're just... not visible

happy to provide more info to anyone that might know what the issue is, just shoot me a ping

lighting settings

and lightmap

all lights in scene are set to baked, other than the two directional lights I have, which are set to mixed. Those are the only ones visible on play

[sudden leaf]

rebaked it again with the exact same settings and it worked, whacky

[deft fiber]

Quality also on ultra in the build?

[thick lodge]

No, it was on low. Thanks mate. Didnt saw that 🙂

[quick shoal]

In my game, the fogs away from the camera look sharp and ugly like this. How can I solve this?

[crude wind]

Search for how to render fog on a skybox in your render pipeline

Perhaps this, since it looks like you are on URP
https://forum.unity.com/threads/apply-fog-to-skybox.1120732/

[kind kraken]

I'm a newbie to Lightmapping, I was used to Box Project the UVs of my models when I worked with realtime lights, but now that I have to bake everything it f*cks up the lightmap, how can I achieve the effect of Tiling and Box Projection UV but also be able to bake that?

[thick lodge]

Can someone explain line renderer to me? I dont get it at all

[deft fiber]

Realtime lights don't use lightmap UVs
Baked lightmaps do, and you should let Unity generate lightmap UVs for them from the mesh import settings rather than making your own, unless you know precisely what you're doing
Lightmaps use the second UV channel so you can have whatever UV mapping you want in the first channel without interfering

[deft fiber]

That's not relevant to lighting
or physics

[untold saddle]

trying to light this small area, and I lit the room (red) first. it room (red) looks good now, but room (blue) doesn't, so I generate lighting, and it gets all messed up. any way to get it consistent across rooms?

[chilly kettle]

Hart to say without seeing any settings or additional Info

[golden surge]

So when unity warns about multiple scenes loaded with different lighting settings, is that something to worry about as long as i control which is the active scene? Or does it still matter?

[snow pollen]

Just a quick question
If we import Bakery into a project, then bake lighting, then remove bakery from the project, does the baked lighting stay?

[chilly kettle]

yeah it should, but you have to delete all the missing scripts from it.
But why should you remove bakery after bake? 😄

[arctic isle]

No, only the active scene's lighting settings are taken into account when baking with multiple scenes

So it doesn't matter if you have different settings assigned to different scenes. I recently raised it internally that maybe we should remove this warning because it doesn't add very much value, but it's definitely not the priority right now.

[spring glade]

hey gang, im using URP an am getting this weird dark areas that dont seem to pe processed the same way the rest of the level is

any tips on what to look out for

oh yeah, its also a polyshape made with pro builder

[arctic isle]

Make sure you have the 'generate lightmap UVs' (might have a slightly different label) checkbox on for the probuilder object. Beyond that I'd look in the debug draw modes to check that the UVs and charts are there, the texels are valid and finally that a lightmap is being generated for these faces.

[chilly kettle]

I am baking a outdoor & indoor scene with just the Environment Lighting and no additional light sources.
I thought that the environment light will lit the complete scene, but it seems that the house is throwing a "shadow".
The Environment Lighting is very dark indoors and bright outdoors.
Is there a way to light the whole seen at the same rate?
(Images with "Cast shadow" On and Off on the buildings mesh - nothing else changed)

[deft fiber]

Is the first image not showing the result you want?

[chilly kettle]

It does.
I disabled the Cast Shadow of the building.
But i wanted to add a sun also and this will cause the problem, that the sun is shining through the walls ^^.
I could add a realtime directional light for the sun, and enable the cast shadow of the walls after bake, but this is for mobile VR and i want to avoid realtime lights i guess.

I always thought, that environment lights will brighten up the whole scene, but i read that they dont and are more like an "emissive skybox" with light for the outside.

I could add some arealights inside i think.

[deft fiber]

Probably no easy or elegant way to do it
Environment lighting brightens up everything if lighting is not baked, so it cannot tell what's occluded and not
Since you're baking lighting anyway you can simply give the interior some lights

[chilly kettle]

There is no build in way to brighten up the whole scene, right?
I guess "Bakery" has that.

[deft fiber]

I believe you'd have to resort to hacks like combining lightmaps or using each material's base map as its emission also or something like that

[chilly kettle]

Oh.. thats not what i want 😄
I guess i will live with the first view and dont care for the "sun" 😄

[deft fiber]

Maybe it's cloudy ^^

[main wolf]

why not add a static/mixed 'sun' light then bake?

[chilly kettle]

because it will shine through the walls (if i want the environment light to reach the indoor scene)
or it will be to dark when i active the shadowcaster on the wall.

[main wolf]

not if you bake it

[thin zephyr]

if i am stitching together a bunch of prefabs realtime to make a large maze level, what are my options with baked lighting? could I individually bake each prefab store them and somehow stitch them together in a realtime gen build? or should I just do realtime lighting with 1 source, and use emission and other things, and just use realitime Global Illumination post processing v2 BiRP stack? and just turn lights off via proximity so I am keeping my lights low in numbers ? (1-8) I am currently at around 300 - 1000 batches depending on whats on scene and trying to stay around there or less. performance wise im at around 160 fps-ish, but aiming to cap at 60 anyway for consistency (this is on a 3080 so im sure lower gpu will have lower fps). any thoughts? thanks!

[deft fiber]

1. stitched together is possible but a lot of trouble, if you go with it you may find useful:
   https://github.com/Ayfel/PrefabLightmapping/
   https://youtu.be/KbxiGH6igBk
2. PPv2 has global illumination? I'm not aware of it
3. You'll probably want to just go with realtime lighting and cull the meshes and lights as much as possible
   Make sure to familiarize yourself with forward and deferred rendering paths if you use realtime lights

[thin zephyr]

for #2, i am using https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/radiant-global-illumination-225934

on BiRP - PPv2 stack

left off / right on

but this is just a test, i actually have a directional light i turned off just to see the GI only

test just to see GI on emissive objects only

also, thanks for your reply

[deft fiber]

I see, a custom solution like this could be helpful to improve the look of realtime lights
Just check to see if it has specific limitations that are relevant here

[wise python]

I'm trying to get Unity to stop baking my lighting. As far as I know all my lights are set to Realtime and Baked Global illumination is turned off. If I rotate my Directional light it starts baking and Unity will hang. Would appreciate any thoughts.

[deft fiber]

If your lighting window has an "auto generate" checkbox next to generate lighting button, disable that
Also make sure realtime and baked GI are both disabled

[wise python]

These are the settings I have currently

But I still get this

[deft fiber]

Seems like it could be a bug
I'd restart the editor also

And if there's an option in the generate lighting button's drop down to clear baked lighting cache, that may help too

[wise python]

Sadly that didn't fix it, but ill keep playing with it. Thanks for the input.

[rocky fox]

Hi! I'm getting dark corners at the edges of my walls when baking lightmaps (using bakery). Anyone know how to fix this?

I only have a skylight and directional light in my scene. The room is only lit by the window. But even the wall facing the window still has the dark corners

ambient occlusion is disabled too

[night shell]

this honestly almost looks like how it should, your just seeing the natural shadowing that occurs in the corners of the room

[rocky fox]

Hmm I guess that does happen, but it feels overly harsh here. Here's another POV, I feel like it definitely should be spreading out to the corners a bit more, this corner here is really dark

Increasing bounces didn't really help either. So idk maybe it is realistic and I just need to tweak the lighting more

Update: Changing skybox helped with spreading out lighting a lot more. I thought it was a bit odd of a "solution" for it to so dramatically affect how the lighting was spreading but maybe I just had some weird conflicting settings ^^' It was a throwaway skybox anyway

[tulip tendon]

you might have SSAO on

[brazen sierra]

Hello everyone, I'm looking for some advice on lighting my scene.

I've made some modular walls, flat textured, and I'm getting seams when I light with baked lighting in URP. No matter how I tweak the settings I can't seem to get rid of them. Here are my thoughts on what the problem could be,

Mesh
Meshes are created in MagicaVoxel, cleaned up in Blender with VoxelCleaner v2,
TheStrokeForge - Vox Cleaner

Here are the meshes as they appear in the Unity preview window. The fireplace module has a hole through it to resemble a chimney.

UV
UVs are generated by VoxelCleaner v2 as well, I know the generated UVs aren't 'padded' (I think that's the right term), so I do get some UV errors in Unity, however the UV errors don't appear to be next to the seams?

Lighting Settings
Finally, here are my as-is lighting settings, I've done a bunch of tweaking but seem to get the same results. The only time I've got rid of seams is when I moved to Realtime GI mode, but I'd like to use Baked lighting.

If anyone can give me some direction on this, I'd really appreciate it!

[lofty quartz]

I am using 2023.3 and the new settings for the shadow caster 2d on a tilemap. How can I get the shadow to cast on the wall behind the wall where the player is currently positioned? The shadows work, but if it's in the same tilemap it shows all tiles regardless if they are covered by a shadow or not.

[quick heath]

Does anyone know why my shadows look different if I start a scene from a different scene? When I run the scene using the Play button, everything looks fine.

[deft fiber]

Play button automatically generates lighting but it's not saved into scene so you have to generate it manually (with realtime and baked lightmapping disabled unless you intend to use one of those workflows)

[deft fiber]

Why not let Unity generate lightmap UVs? Lack of padding can still cause bleeding issues even if there's no detected overlap
The automatic generation you can synchronize with the correct lightmap resolution

No padding for UVs in general can cause texture bleed

[quick heath]

So, what can I do?

[deft fiber]

Generate lighting manually as I said

[arctic isle]

Hey, Unity is rebaking your environment lighting in this case. You mentioned that Unity hangs. Can you show your lighting settings? How large is your scene?

[arctic isle]

Generate lighting on each scene manually. This occurs because the scene does not have any env lighting of its own. When you open it in the editor the environment lighting is baked for you but not saved anywhere (hence you see it when you hit the play button). Similarly it's baked as part of the build process. Playmode scene loading is stuck in between these two with no good way of invoking a bake while in Play mode.

This entire system is poorly thought out and we removed it in 2023.2. Now you need to bake the lighting if you make changes to it, leading to no such confusion. We will keep improving this in future releases.

[tulip tendon]

The APV's are most impressive

this is URP in unity 2023.2

everything is light probe lit

and these are the settings

i bumped everything to 11 and it only took 2m to bake

scene size for reference

these are the probe settings

no leaking or artifacting visible

yall gotta admit this is insane

actual in game view

[wise python]

Interestingly it fixed by removing and adding the skybox again.

[arctic isle]

GPU Lightmapper go brrr 😄

We're still fixing some bugs with memory usage and very large scenes in APV. 2023.3 should be even better once the dust settles with the new features

Thanks for posting, very much appreciate the feedback!

[tulip tendon]

yeah i noticed lol, when i tried to bake in a bigger scene it started to google chrome all my RAM and crashed just about everything

[arctic isle]

Ah nice! Thanks for the report. We've fixed this in 2023.3 and backporting it to 2023.2 soon.

[tulip tendon]

while your here, since i dont know where to report this, there are some bug reports i made that have been fixed but they were not marked as fixed for me, so if you could forward this to the right person or redirect me to where i should report this it would be awsome

[arctic isle]

Sure thing, that seems to be an issue with the tooling on the reporter's side for you. I'll forward this to the right team tomorrow when I'm at the office.

[tulip tendon]

thank you

[split grail]

Hello, i'm trying to bake the lights for my house, it looks nice without baking or messing with lights whatsoever, but for perfomance and all that i need to bake the lights, tho whenever i do i get these really weird results, have tried playing with settings but nothing really seems to change:

Some walls just remain fully black, the ground gets random big tiles and it overall doesnt look at it should, without baked lights it looks nice

[split grail]

the big tiles on the floor are the "tiles" of my floor, they're separate square objects

[arctic isle]

For the completely black objects, you need to turn on "Generate Lightmap UVs" in the asset importer and make them static in your scene. For the tiles on the floor, turning off ambient occlusion if you have that on will probably help.

[split grail]

I do have all that for the black objects, i will try ambient occlusion later, thanks in advance

[mighty marlin]

So I got a issue in my map, I got so many lights that they are flickering at least in the preview mode. What can I possibly do to avoid or fix this issue?

[blissful dune]

This will see like a dumb question, but... If I take a cylinder and stick it in the ground, and one side of it is shaded darker than the other, and that moves as I advance the time, is that a shadow? Nothing is rendered on the water.

I ask because I switched shadows off in Enviro3 (the only lighting source I have in the scene) and these shadings on the cylinder persist.

[whole bramble]

is it okay to have 4k lightmap texture for mobile?

i have some myths and itches with this "4k" thing , i know that the lightmap count will be significantly reduced but will there be any performance issue using a 4k texture ?

[untold saddle]

why is only part of this tunnel system lit? the "shell" was done first, and the "walls" second. both are done with probuilder, but the "walls" just aren't rendering correctly.... what can i do?

[sonic mason]

i removed the Light probes and i have no light probes on the scene , but all of my object is still effected

[untold saddle]

i forgot to make them static :P

[whole bramble]

you have to clear the bake data to get rid of lightprobe because they are baked even if you remove that after lightmapping

[heady monolith]

im using URP and a directional light

there are no shadows pls help :(

[crude lintel]

Are shadows enabled on the renderer? Is the light source set to realtime shadows? Do the used materials/shaders support shadows? What is the shadow render distance setting set to?

[brittle pecan]

Is is possible for global illumination not to load properly in a build? When I started a new game most of the lighting wasn't working (objects were lit despite it being dark). However when I saved and loaded the lighting worked perfectly.

[arctic isle]

It really depends on which lighting features you're using and how. Can you explain how you set up your lighting and how you set up your scene loading?

[arctic isle]

There's a limit on the number of pixel lights you can have on a single object within view. You can increase that limit in the URP settings or the Project Settings in BiRP.

[arctic isle]

I am struggling to understand this question 😅

[sonic mason]

i did clear the bake data , but as soon as i render/bake again it comes back ,

[whole bramble]

bake again keeping the lightprobe component disabled

[gleaming bone]

What is there recommended way for handling baked lighting/probes when additively loading scenes?
Most of the resources seem to recommend designating a scene as the "master", load it as main and other scenes as additive and then bake. Does this still work?
Also, in runtime, does this setup require the master scene to be always loaded before the additive scenes. Or does it not matter?

[deft fiber]

Shadows and shading are two different things
Shading which lit shaders do generally refers to the function of lighting surfaces relative to their angle towards light as well as distance to it
Shadows are a feature on top of that to remove lighting entirely on materials that are occluded from light, referred to as "shadow casting"

[deft fiber]

The widely recommended way is to not do that and use realtime lighting instead of baking
There are a bunch of hacks and workarounds to make it sort of work but none of them are good or easy

The topic has been discussed a few times on this channel in the past week or so

[gleaming bone]

baked lighting looks better. The whole game is additively loaded. I can't just give up on having baked lighting. The game's not procedurally generated so this should be a common case with a recommended workflow from Unity.
I did search the channel with "additive" and "lightmap" keywords before posting and didn't find any good answers.

[deft fiber]

Additive scenes are just one of the potential solutions to using baked lighting with procedural levels

I can't fetch the earlier conversations from where I am but it shouldn't be an awfully long scroll up

[tulip tendon]

look into Adaptive Probe Volumes

[deft fiber]

I guess procedural levels are not the root problem here as I assumed?

[sonic mason]

the thing is i dont have any light probes at all anymore
but for some reason , its still there like a cache , ive tried deleting all my lightmaps and rebake everything , it still wont go away

[brittle pecan]

I actually figured it out, turns out it was some light and reflection probes. I think they were disabled at some point during the game and that’s why saving and loading fixed it

[blissful dune]

This is exaclty what I was looking for, thank you for that excellent answer!

[whole bramble]

are you using several scenes?

probably you should clear gi caches

[azure river]

hey does anyone know why my lights dont work meaning if i try to mess with them they dont respond to any changes and pp does the same thing as well anyone know?

[edgy root]

Hey friends. Struggling with the lighting in my scene - shadows on the trees look different in editor vs build, I assume something's wrong with my shadow cascades? Confused why it's not popping in the editor, only in the build. Any ideas what may be the problem?

[chilly kettle]

Different Quality Settings?

[edgy root]

solved it. was an issue with Dreamscape tree leaf shader. Had to declare light shadows and cascade light shadows on one line: #pragma multi_compile _ _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE

[timber lichen]

If you are using forward rendering then this might be why, forward rendering has a limit of 8 lights if I'm not mistaken

[gleaming bone]

IIRC that is still in preview in URP so I can't use that.

I actually did try the "bake everything at once under a master scene" approach and It seems to be working. I have a question though:

How are light probes handled for additive scenes? The light probes only existed in the master scene(positioned accoridngly for each additive scene). But in play mode I seem to be getting light probes and lightmaps working without needing to actually load the "master scene". Is it actually necessary to load the master scene in runtime after baking?

[tulip tendon]

not exactly true, i use them for my game, i made a reddit post using them in URP https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/18gl380/the_new_unity_apvs_are_actually_rly_cool/

[gleaming bone]

AFAIK it's added on Unity 2023 which means also agreeing to the new runtime BS for APVs. I can live without it if I can make the single scene setup work.

[tulip tendon]

the runtime fee only applies starting unity 6, the 2023 tech releases are not affected

[azure river]

hey does anyone know why my lights dont work meaning if i try to mess with them they dont respond to any changes and pp does the same thing as well anyone know?

anyone know how to fix?

[ember ginkgo]

help: #archived-shaders message

[deft fiber]

Materials that are smooth or metallic require reflection probes (or a sky if outdoors) to be reflective

What you mean by it looking "awful" could be due to many reasons

There's only one light and no ambient light so the shadows are unnaturally dark
The materials may be too rough so they show no specular reflection, or perhaps using a shader that doesn't implement specularity at all

[ember ginkgo]

How do I add ambient light?

[ember ginkgo]

It just looks odd

Or am I being paranoid?

Look at the drinking cup

Those shades are shit

[timber lichen]

Could be because they are set to baked

Also could be a bug, try rebooting

[azure river]

they are set to baked

[timber lichen]

That's why

Change them to realtime if you want to have them respond to movement

[azure river]

but doesnt it mean just for them to be baked lights

[timber lichen]

Baked lights are not expected to be moved

[azure river]

oh but its not that my lights just stop working if i bake them

[timber lichen]

Then what's the issue? Be more exact

What are you trying to do that doesn't work

[azure river]

pp would stop working if i bake them and with my lights as well they just wouldnt be turned on

[timber lichen]

Weird

What pipeline are you using

[azure river]

i think it might be fixed now but i had to delete pp and download it back to and put new lights

im not sure

[timber lichen]

If you said donwload post processing then it's most likely built in pipeline

Since srp has post processing built in(urp and hdrp, for custom srp you have to code it yourself)

[gleaming bone]

If I'm understanding this right, Unity 6 is the 2023 LTS version. I required to stick to the current LTS version for this project. So I can't use APVs.

Could someone confirm if the single master scene baking approach actually requires the master scene to be loaded at runtime? I'm finding unity forum posts that say I need to do that but probes and light maps are working for me in additive scenes without the master scene even loaded.

[timber lichen]

If you baked your lights, then you should be good to go

Afaik even if you load a different scene at runtime, your lighting won't be affected because it was baked in the editor

[arctic isle]

Hey, your issue with the bug reports should be fixed now

[tulip tendon]

awsome thanks for letting me know, but there is also this one which has not been an issue anymore but is still an active bug

[quaint river]

Hi, can someone help me please. I am getting pretty bad light bleed in my scene Baked , unbaked still produces light bleeding.

Light settings

[deft fiber]

Check the lighting and the materials for the notes I gave
If you can share their properties it might be possible to give more specific suggestions

[ember ginkgo]

what about

enabling rtx?

and baking images to 4K?

[deft fiber]

I don't think I said anything about either of those things

[ember ginkgo]

just asking

if it could help

[ember ginkgo]

im baking with blender so idk how I could add the metallness or remove the roughness

[deft fiber]

If you feel stumped, best start by sharing the light's and some materials' properties

[ember ginkgo]

idk what u mean with material properties

[deft fiber]

Is the light baked in blender?

[ember ginkgo]

no

[deft fiber]

Your meshes are in unity as mesh renderers, they have materials defined in that component that determine their properties such as how they react to light

[ember ginkgo]

this?

[arctic isle]

this one was just not looked at yet by the URP team. they'll get to it 🤷‍♂️

[deft fiber]

Yes
It looks like they're not using any smoothness or metallic maps, so they'll default do dull 0 metallic and 0.5 smoothess
and your normal maps don't look right at all so the objects are not receiving lightfrom the correct direction
Simply put your PBR maps aren't exported in the way Unity expects

[rain tartan]

Hello people! I have a question, I was trying to use 2D lights in my top down game, but because everything is rendered in Y it makes it look weird at various times. I would like to know if there is a way to use a sprite and what settings I should put on it to make it look like a light

[gleaming bone]

I get why the light maps are working. But unity docs specifically state that lightprobes are not properly handled when loading/unloading scenes additively. But after baking, they are working for me in additive scenes without the master scene(the one with the light probes) ever being loaded.

[timber lichen]

Lol? That's...interestinf

[whole bramble]

what is the best lightmap compression format for mobile if i have lots of lightmaps like 20-25?

[chilly kettle]

The one that gives you the best result while having the lowest file size ^^

What resolutions does your lightmaps have?

[whole bramble]

sorry for the replying late , but im confused about choosing the size too, sometimes im thinking to have 4096 , because it will make the lightmap count reduced and save some drawcalls

and sometimes, im thinking ....like should i use 4k textures for mobile?💁‍♂️

[chilly kettle]

Some mobile devices doesnt even support 4K Images.
I would stick to 2k. But you say you have 20-25 4K Lightmaps?

[whole bramble]

im foresighting the lightmap count ...as i have a map of 81sqkm (bigger than gta 5)

[whole bramble]

yeah, im still sticking with 2k map

[chilly kettle]

What are your baking settings?

[whole bramble]

subtractive

and non directional

[chilly kettle]

i would go with GPU instead of CPU Lightmapper, but the rest looks okay.
For the first Test Lightmaps i recommend using a lower Resolution like 5

[whole bramble]

i heard cpu lightmapper give better result than gpu

obviously , in case of speed , progressive gpu is the winner

but i was concerned about quality , that's why i choosed cpu one(I lack a 4gb graphics card too^^)

[night shell]

Both are the same quality wise

The difference comes with what hardware is used to lightmap the scene

But the end result is the same

If your also concerned with lightmap counts, you might also be able to reduce things further by making some objects still contribute to the lightmap, but receive lighting through light probes

For example say you have trees in your scene, you can have those still marked as contribute GI static, but in the mesh renderer settings for the tree meshes you can change the “Receive GI” field to LightProbes instead of Lightmaps

Granted when you do that, that means any meshes using light probes have to have a light probe group setup for the scene

And since I know your concerned with performance, light probes are very lightweight

[whole bramble]

I see, but somewhere it was given priority to cpu over gpu lightmapper, whatever , i dont have a 4gb gpu anyone , cant dream oof it 🙂

[whole bramble]

sorry for bringing it here just for some moment , but as you had said that it;s possible to mix up lightmap and texture uvs in one variable , so that gpu can have some rest . I tried that on my vegetation shader (using alpha blend), have I successfully done it accordingly? could you please give an glimpse on it?

here is this , just for showing you

[night shell]

Looks correct to me

[whole bramble]

is it possible to have both lightmapped and lightprobed objects rendered in a single pass when using legacy vertex lit rendering path?

[supple coyote]

Hello, I have a question. Can I somehow make some gameobjects to ignore exposure? I have the effect when looking up to the sky/sun some of the gameobjects going really really bright. The effect is cool but it's to hard

the exposure itself is fine, I don't want to change it, but idk how to manage this transition in brightnes

[mighty marlin]

Does anybody here know what might be causing that it looks like two DirectionalLights might be cast? The one with a nice tint to it is baked, the light one is well, I don't know why it is there

[deft fiber]

It's not practical to try to exclude anything from being affected by exposure, rather than fixing the exposure itself
I'd first look into the sky settings to figure out why it the exposure system sees it as so dark that everything else needs to be blown out
Also disable the particle system temporarily to rule out its interference
Then you could tweak automatic exposure settings to see if the problem is there, and consider if a fixed exposure works better in this case

If these don't reveal the issue you could ask in #archived-hdrp , they could know better how the HDRP adaptive exposure works precisely, which I assume you're using

[deft fiber]

First rule out there being extra directional lights using the Light Explorer window

[mighty marlin]

That can be ruled out.

[deft fiber]

What type of light is it? Are you also using some kind of volumetrics? Does the phantom light react to you rotating the directional light?

[mighty marlin]

Well the directional light is a directional light, that's for sure, I am not using any volumetrics as I'm using the Standard rendering pipeline, and the phanom light does in fact rotate while rotating the directional light.

[deft fiber]

I'm wondering if it was of type baked and changed to realtime, or it's mixed and not working quite right with the shadowmask mode, or someting like that
We're definitely seeing both baked and realtime parts of the light, presumably from the same source

Normally baked lights are realtime in editor until baked, and then they disappear entirely
Mixed lights should appear as baked to some objects (after baking), but as realtime to others

[mighty marlin]

Yeah it might be something to do with the shadowmask mode, as this is a Mixed light.
Do you have anything I could check to ensure everything in theory is correct?

[deft fiber]

I'd do test bake first as the light Baked instead of Mixed
Then test bakes with various Shadowmask modes
Could skip the first step if you're confident but I like to test everything foolproofly

Remember to use GPU baking if you have one, and turn down the samples and resolution (not "max lightmap size") to speed up test bakes

[mighty marlin]

Yeah the foolproof part might have strangely enough been the problem, after moving the light a little bit, and rebaking it, the issue was somehow solved just by doing that.

[deft fiber]

Goes to show that you can hardly be too thorough!

[hot pelican]

Hey guys, any ideas on how to fix lights leaking through walls? Im using a point light and URP

[atomic parrot]

How to make viewmodels that are under the influence of camera stacking follow the lighting of the scene?

The gun is bland and is not following the lighting of the scene

Nor does it project shadows

This is the material

This is the weapons camera

This is the pistol

[zinc flume]

Make it cast shadow

[sweet blaze]

Hello, I have some lighting issues where my ambient light becomes 0 when im on a build

It looks fine on the editor, but on a build it's pitch black (the ambient light)

[ember ginkgo]

In HDRP, textures go white when I add a sky

why could it be?

[distant yew]

question...

we have a game with like 40 levels, each level has its own lighting in it though

is there any way to tell unity to bake all 40

rather than having to open each level one at a time and bake?

[wanton knot]

I believe you will run out of vram, but you can try

Just have them all opened and the lighting will bake for them all

[arctic isle]

hey, you can write a script (place it under Assets/Editor ) to do this.

using UnityEditor.SceneManagement;
using UnityEditor;
using UnityEngine;

[MenuItem("Tools/Bake All Scenes")]
public static void BakeAllScenes()
{
  List<string> scenePaths; // or fetch them from EditorBuildSettings
  
  foreach(var scene in scenePaths)
  {
    EditorSceneManager.OpenScene(scenePath, OpenSceneMode.Single);
    Lightmapping.Bake();
    EditorSceneManager.SaveOpenScenes();
  }
}

disclaimer: didn't check this code it may not compile, treat is more or less as pseudocode

[distant yew]

im a level designer ^^; Im more on the art side though, so do I just... put this in to notepad++? sorry lol just trying to make sure I do it right

[arctic isle]

oh ok let me check the code first then so you don't have to debug compilation errors yourself

[distant yew]

basically i dont need to do it during a full build, I just want to trigger it globally for review and let it bake out without having to commit to a full build of the game

[arctic isle]

😄

[distant yew]

so its just like part of the workflow not the final export

and thanks a ton

[wanton knot]

Why complicate so much when you can just open them and bake tho?

[arctic isle]

If they have to do it again it's going to be super annoying I guess

[wanton knot]

Fair enough

[distant yew]

because we have a ton of different people working on it at once, and basically once a week they want me to fork a branch, rebake at final quality.

[wanton knot]

Yup makes sense

[distant yew]

so its not unusual for people to leave lightmaps at like 1x quality for speed, and forgetting

but we use a global quality setting so I dont have to manually adjust each scene, just set it correctly and bake

[arctic isle]

https://gist.github.com/giorgospetkakis/62cb14967368b8d6c4344b23199a8959

[distant yew]

❤️

[arctic isle]

This will make a menu item for you under Tools and will bake every scene that's enabled in the build settings

Enjoy 🙂

Just fair warning, once you click it you won't be able to cancel until it's all done

[distant yew]

where do I put said script?

[arctic isle]

Assets/Editor/CustomBaker.cs

I updated the filename on the gist now as well