archived-lighting

[chilly kettle]

10000 is really far.. first i would recommend using a smaller scale.

If you only have this one light, you naturally get one bright and one dark side.
You have nothing in your scene that could make the dark side a little brighter (if i understand you right and you want to do brighten the dark side a little?)

[white turret]

what is causing this?

[chilly kettle]

https://youtu.be/y_vw-jzuNs0?si=xacMs9X3X2AKWFHU

Could be causes by light limit (your light gets deactivated and so the shadows also)

[upper fable]

I don't think the light limit affects shadows at all

You could use the Frame Debugger to see how the shadowmaps are rendered and whether something changes there when that flickering happens

[white turret]

Its a directional light if that got disabled i think we would notice it

[white turret]

Okay I will do that

One question: How can I access frame debugger in the build? Because this only happens in a build

[languid cove]

Emission on material doesn't actually light other objects. If you do want an emissive object to project light to the surroundings, you need to bake the lighting through lightmap and lightprobes / probevolume

[tropic tulip]

Hey, guys! I have an issue with lighting. So, when I change graphics settings check happens.

I have in the room a light and when the game starts and I am changing quality settings to high that happens I am not sure why

[surreal nimbus]

im trying to make a world for vrchat and for some reason my lighting isnt showing up at all? im pretty new to this and have only ever just made avatars so i havent messed with lighting. have i done something wrong? because no light is showing

[surreal nimbus]

omg tyy again im sorry im new to this lol

[vast mesa]

I just upgraded my unity from 2022.3.28 to 2022.3.50. I got some lighting issue in mobile. Anyone knows why its happening.

Even I have created fresh project and Import assets in it and light baked. But still getting issue.

Issue:
Directional Light Doesn't emit light and cast shadow.

[vast mesa]

Anyone knows?

[vast mesa]

Samsung

[clever lintel]

Hello, I have a certain "problem" with the lighting.

I explain:
When I import a blender model the lighting is per face but when it is a procedural model it is per vertex

Is there a way that it is always lighting per face???

[pallid bear]

So, does ssgi work only with directional lights? I'm confused

[lavish notch]

how do I fix this:

[boreal vault]

Hello, is it possible to remove this ugly separation between objects ?

[lavish notch]

isnt it the range?

[boreal vault]

yeah the objects are in the range of the lights

[vital wren]

According to the docs:

"The Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI) override is a High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) feature that uses the depth and color buffer of the screen to calculate diffuse light bounces.

SSGI and RTGI replace all lightmap and Light Probe data. If you enable this override on a Volume that affects the Camera, Light Probes and the ambient probe stop contributing to lighting for GameObjects.

[jaunty birch]

hi when i move the editor camera this happens?

how can i keep it on the shadowy one

[pallid bear]

yeah I read that but couldn't conclude definitively. So it does work is what you're saying? Cause I can see it working on my directional light but not spotlight.

It's probably too weak to have an effect

[sturdy torrent]

I wanted to try baking lights and followed everything in the tutorial, but this is how it looks while rendering. Should I even continue baking? Is it going to fix itself? I'm asking because It's going to take an hour.

[vital wren]

You've got me curious, so I'm testing this myself right now

[vital wren]

I tried out SSGI in an existing project. It does the reverse of what I expected. So I'm just really confused right now. 🙂

[pallid bear]

Light source?

[vital wren]

Spot - it works

What it did that confused me was I pointed away from the light source towards a wall face around a corner. It correctly displayed bounced light there.

I thought it wouldn’t do that but that must be my misunderstanding

[pallid bear]

for me, there is literally no difference

there isn't even a small difference where I can tell something happened but can't tell what

[vital wren]

are you using baked lighting? APV? Baked + APV?

i'm not sure how the GI cache is supposed to work, but if I ever run into anything strange clearing it usually does the trick

meaning I clear it 10 times a day

[rotund rain]

Hey guys i have an issue, im trying to implement some baked lights into my unity scene, i made these crystals wich light up themselves and the cave around them. After baking the "Baked lightmap" view in the scene shows that everything works but then when i go into the "Shaded view" everything looks weird: the crystals seem to be wroking but the cave is not lit up at all. Why?

[vital wren]

What does it look like in Game view?

[rotund rain]

in the game view this looks completely dark as if there where no lights

[vital wren]

The first screenshot - what mode is that in for scene view? Debug view is not on there as the button is not pressed.

[rotund rain]

its called "Baked Lightmap" view

[deft fiber]

What shader do the cave walls use

[rotund rain]

Im guessing that the shader is the problem

[deft fiber]

I'd guess the issue is that the shader doesn't implement baked GI in any way
It should be as simple as adding https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@6.9/manual/Baked-GI-Node.html to the fragment emission

[rotund rain]

Huh i tried and something broke

I got a hybrid between the two scene views

Gimme a few minutes ill try to understand how this node works

Oh it worked! Thanks!

[dry pumice]

does anyone know why baking the lights does this when the directional light is pointing down and not to the side?

[dry pumice]

i have all lights off now and it does this

[jaunty birch]

hi , it takes 30 minutes to bake 6 cubes?

[deft fiber]

Show all lighting settings, not just a cropped view of them

[jaunty birch]

usuaklly it quits with a pathtracer error code 2 and switches from gpu to cpu

even though its a medium small map and i have an rtx 3050

it switched to cu

cpu

and this happens

[deft fiber]

You're also baking realtime GI which is a whole another lightmapping system that doesn't benefit from GPU at all

[jaunty birch]

ive tried without realtime asw

its the same porblem

[deft fiber]

Anything that's lightmap static will be included in the bake, I would triple check that they are only those six cubes you intend to bake

It's recommended to bake manually instead of using Auto Generate since it can be buggy, and clear baked lighting cache before baking again in case there's issues there

Each Unity version up to 6 iirc got an improved VRAM requirement for GPU baking

So if your editor version is older, like 2021, and your GPU doesn't have enough VRAM, it might have to switch to CPU baking
If you get random or vague errors when baking, just restarting the editor might help
It's best to start with a simple test scene when experimenting with baking settings
Complicated scenes often have things that are affect baking which are easy to overlook

[keen valley]

Hey, does anyone know if there are plans to develop selective baking for APVs?

e.g. I already have a 1 Volume baked, and want to bake a second one, but keep the baked information of the first Volume without rebaking everything in it.
Does that make sense?

[deft fiber]

It's officially "under consideration"

[keen valley]

thank you, did not know about this portal. wrote my feedback over there :)

[golden crow]

I want to bake lights. i also want to have specularity so i guess i will have to use mixed lights. my problem is when i use mixed lights it doesnt bake shadows, it displays realtime shadows. when i switch from mixed mode to baked, it bakes shadows but now i dont have specular reflections. how do i get only the specular reflections part from the mixed light mode? i want to bake shadows normally i dont want realtime shadows for static objects.

[dreamy ledge]

Hi! I tried to generate lights and this is what I got...I'm really overwhelmed about what happened. Any help ? It's URP

[chilly kettle]

Pink Materials normally mean that the shader is not working on your render pipeline.
Have they been correct before bake?

[dreamy ledge]

Yeah, also I generated lights 2 weeks ago and it was fine, I added more objects to the scene and now I got this result

Small objects(like furniture), not the house itself

[pallid gorge]

Hello! After upgrading to unity 6, a strange problem occured: Light backing no longer works, it just freezes at this stage ("Post processing 2/3). I've waited for like 4 hours, but nothing changed (in unity 2022.3 it took only like 30 minutes.). My specs: 4060 TI 16gb VRAM, 16 gb DDR4 RAM, i7 12700k. I tried searching about this, but found only that it occurs with GPUs 4080 or more powerful. Maybe someone figured this out and know how to fix it?

[smoky tulip]

https://youtu.be/IpVuIZYFRg4?t=2170

In this video at the current timestamp, they are showing a day / night cycle in HDRP using Physically Based Sky. They use some tricks for weighted blending to ensure that the real time direct lighting is pretty similar to the APV baked indirect lighting.

Has anyone a working script that can achieve such weighet blending?

Also, if they are using HDRP with Physically Based Sky, how do they have that nice star skybox during the night? Are they using a HDRI sky for the visual environment, while using Physically Based Sky for the lighting?

[novel forge]

Same issue here, but I'm only on a rx580

[vast mesa]

anyone please let me know why this issue is occurring?

[chilly kettle]

possibly the shadow distance

[vast mesa]

In editor its working fine but in mobile its different and its happening after upgrade the unity version.

[foggy monolith]

creating a 2D mining game with 2021.3.8f1 and currently attempting to implement ShadowCaster2D to my procedurally generated enviroment for some dynamic shadows while mining but getting pretty stuck on getting the shadows to work correctly.. at first my problem was figuring out how to generate them in the first place as the enviroment is generated randomly during runtime, but some custom scripts and other mumbo jumbo managed to get that working... currently my setup is i have 120 tilemaps each with their own chunk of the entire map, these tilemaps are enabled/disabled according to how close the player is.
the problem im dealing with currently is that the shadow casters dont seem to recognize that the other tilemaps should not have shadows drawn over, causing shadows to overlap on places they shouldnt be. my first thought was seeing if its possible to always draw the shadows behind so even if its drawing where it shouldnt it should still look normal but im at a bit of a loss, example images provided below; any help is appreciated! ❤️

Not even entirely sure if this is lighting as much as it could be coding.. i guess that entirely depends on the possible solutions if there are any

also part of why the map is split into chunks is due to the shadow caster having to be completely recreated each time i broke/placed a block, so regenerating the shadow casters on THE WHOLE MAP was very not ideal

actually to narrow it down what im really looking for is shadows that cant cast over ANY of the sprites that can cast them

AH just as i say that i had a random thought, "what if i added this thing i heard of earlier called a "composite shadow caster 2d" to the parent of all the tilemaps?"

that got me exactly what i was looking for!

hrm but when i do that the shadows flicker, since im regenerating them 🤔

none of this really feels like the right way to do it 😅 if anyone knows of a better way to go about this im all ears

[tame mural]

i just upgraded to unity 6 and every spot that isnt in direct contact with light seems way too dark. any ideas on whats causing this?

usually this shouldnt be solid black like this, but instead just shadowed as would be expected

[dawn pawn]

In Unity 6 you have to regenerate lighting data. Go to the Lighting settings and make sure the environment is setup and bake the data (does not mean you have to bake all lighting, just ambient lights/skybox reflections)

Already submitted a bug report but this is 'intended behavior' :/
Feel free to report another one

[tame mural]

i tried generating lighting for realtime lightmaps already but it was stuck on "processing" for 5 minutes so i just killed it...

[dawn pawn]

Can you share the settings?

And realtime lightmaps dont need updating afaik, since they are realtime

[tame mural]

settings for what exactly? sorry im not the most proficient when it comes to lighting related things 😅

[dawn pawn]

if you share all the tabs in Lighting, you got all the data for sure haha

[idle whale]

Hey, i have a stupid question about lighting 👀
Im making a room with multiple lights that can be switched from on / off at runtime. Can i bake them or i need to put the lights on realtime mode ?

[dawn pawn]

This would not work with included tools afaik. You would need a custom system if you want to bake them in some way.
If they aren't too many, use Forward+ and put the range as low as possible

[real falcon]

Hello! I have a question.
When I bake lighting with Adaptive Probe Volume in URP, the lighting looks fine when using Upscaling: FSR1.0 and Anti-Aliasing: SMAA. However, when I switch to Upscaling: STPP and Anti-Aliasing: TAA, the lighting appears distorted, almost like ripples.
Is this normal behavior? I tried adjusting the APV options in the Global Volume, but it didn’t solve the issue. Has anyone come across this or found a solution?

[untold badger]

Heya gang I am using Unity 6, 3d URP project - it seems like I have a little issue with shadows? the directional light seems to understand that the wall on the screenshot needs to cast a shadow, but its... doing it weirdly?

if I look at the floor with a certain angle it kind of works, but thats not how my gameplay camera is going to be set up.

I dont think I ever ran into this kind of issue, so I dont even know what to google here - if anyone could tell me the name of this problem I could look into it

[untold badger]

I fixed it by adjusting the near plane, it seems?

no idea why that worked though, lol

[chilly kettle]

sometimes light shines through edges of geometry.
You found one way to fix that 🙂 👍🏾

[deft fiber]

Not through edges in this case, but because of the unintuitive way orthographic shadow casting works polygons that are too big or stretched out may get clipped depending on the near plane setting

[deft fiber]

I don't know if camera dithering is something you can enable while spatial temporal upscaling is in use, but if yes I'd try it
Otherwise I guess I'd report it as a bug since it's a new system

[gritty fox]

I need help here been stuck on this issue for so long now.

I've unwrapped the uvs so many times same as changing around uv seams etc etc to see if that could fix anything, even going through both normal unwrap and smart unwrap all in blender.
I've also tried making these kickboards on separate objects and still the same issue.
I've changed around the baking settings a million times too, Ive put all samples up to 256, increased bounces up to 8, lightmap res up to 60 and padding up to 8 but still nothing. Also tried changing max lightmap size, decreasing scale in lightmap on some objects that say theyve reached the max atlas.

Still nothing. It looks more like chapter 17 filtering artifacts in the lightmapping troubleshooting guide than anything else but I could be wrong.

Not sure what to do from this point but I can't continue much if this keeps happening. I had a worse example but I reset to default baking settings before taking this screenshot.

[deft fiber]

You should describe the two most important things: what you're trying to do and what problem are you experiencing

I cannot infer those with certainty

[gritty fox]

trying to bake the lighting and make it look nice but im getting these artifacts

mostly on anything thats just a white surface

i will rebake and get a better example

[deft fiber]

I cannot tell what's an artifact and what isn't with the post processing you've got going
So disable it for any demonstrations

[gritty fox]

oh sorry

[deft fiber]

Also, is there a reason you're trying to author your own lightmap UVs?

[gritty fox]

no

[deft fiber]

Normally it's well enough to enable lightmap UV generation for all meshes in their import settings that need to be baked, then if you still get UV overlap errors you diagnose them with scene view lightmap debug view, or the lightmap asset viewer itself

[gritty fox]

I just unwrapped and scaled out because theres some walls that have a pattern texture or a normal map detail or something

and I just did it with these same plain walls

[shell juniper]

That looks like color banding. Try changing your color buffer format or enabling dithering on your camera

The setting should be in the urp asset, and might be hidden under additional options

[real falcon]

Thanks for the advice! I had completely forgotten that I had disabled HDR in the PC_RPAsset early on to reduce the load, since it didn't seem to visually affect anything at the time.
Once I switched the Upscaling Filter to STPP and enabled HDR, the issue was resolved. For anyone facing the same problem, make sure to check if Main Camera → Output → HDR Rendering is turned on.
I'm really impressed by how STPP manages to maintain such beautiful visuals even with the Render Scale set to 0.5. I was hoping to use it, so your advice was a big help!

[fiery creek]

Tearing my hair out over reflection probes in URP - I have one set up that covers all of my demo scene with an imported cubemap, however when I run the game all lighting seems to be using the default Unity 'sky' cubemap (pictured). This didn't seem to be an issue before I switched over to URP, perhaps there's a setting I've missed? Any help would be appreciated.

[fiery creek]

Weirdly enough this still happens even if I replace Default-Skybox in the Rendering > Lighting > Environment settings window.

[novel forge]

ol[

[silent mortar]

does anyone know if there's an easy-ish way to sample baked GI on an unlit HDRP shader? https://streamable.com/fzxm3p

i'm working on a custom lighting shader system for dynamic objects (only applied to the gun rn) and I want it to be able to sample baked GI as if it was using light probes. as far as I can tell, there's no easy way to do that with an unlit shader for whatever reason

[dry pumice]

anyone able to tell me whats wrong? ill give anything needed to fix this because i dont know what i need to share for it

[chilly kettle]

Its an "unlit" shader.
Whats the reason you use an unlit shader if you want it to be lit?

[chilly kettle]

Looks like there is still an direktional light or something active?

[dry pumice]

nope. all lights were turned off.

i dont even have anything pointing in that direction.

[silent mortar]

i'm doing a custom lighting shader for dynamic objects, just for a more cohesive style

not sure why you'd need the baked GI node if not to simulate baked GI

[deft fiber]

Baked GI node samples lightmaps, not probes

So dynamic objects can't benefit from it

[silent mortar]

key word as if, the baked GI node takes a position in the fragment no?

i mean just to sample the lightmap at a given position to add to my custom lighting

i'm looking into just writing my own compute shader to directly sample the light probes if this doesn't work

[deft fiber]

Well, correcting myself
According to documentation it should sample light probes when used with dynamic objects

I just never got it to actually do that

[silent mortar]

it seems like it was implemented really strangely, i can't imagine what you'd need it for in a lit shader lol

[deft fiber]

Getting the lightmaps for it works fine with static objects that actually have lightmaps
But they require to be associated to specific objects so you can't just sample the lightmap of the "nearest" object that has it

Or maybe you could technically but probably not practically

That's what probes are for

[silent mortar]

it seems like the baked GI node wouldn't work for what I need, so instead i'm seeing if I can use this to directly sample APV nodes to send to an object's lighting shader https://discussions.unity.com/t/sampling-probe-volumes-from-a-script/936288/2

[pallid gorge]

Does anyone know, what "Probe Adjustment Volume" component does?

[lavish notch]

anyone know how to fix these puorple leaves?

[dawn pawn]

Maybe your ambient lighting only takes in the skybox?

[lavish notch]

I havent turned it on. I usually isnt like this but it turned like this when I upgraded to unity 6

[dawn pawn]

Have you regenerated the lighting? You now have to do that

[lavish notch]

with my direct light?

[dawn pawn]

In the lighting settings at the bottom

[lavish notch]

like this ? I started it I think

[dawn pawn]

Check environments

[shell juniper]

Are you using hdrp

[lavish notch]

yes

[shell juniper]

it might be a lack of diffusion profiles on transmissive leaf materials

they show a purple error color when missing a diffusion profile

[lavish notch]

I mean it worked in hdrp, but when I upgraded my game to Unity 6 this happened and the leaves turned pink/purple

[shell juniper]

could you send a screenshot of the leaf material inspector?

[pallid gorge]

Does anyone know, how to calculate HarmonicsL2 for certain position using new Adaptive Probe Volume (like GetInterpolatedProbe function for standart Light Probes?) or something like that?

[deft fiber]

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/urp/probevolumes-adjustment-volume-component-reference.html

[deft fiber]

Depends for what
APV data only exists on the GPU so you can't read it in scripts
But shaders would have access to it, supposedly

[pallid gorge]

I am trying to make particles work properly with baked lighting using Light Probes, it was pretty easy to do in unity 2023 using GetInterolatedProbe(), but now I don't really know if this is even possible 😦

[deft fiber]

Why is it necessary to use that method to "make them work" with probes?

[pallid gorge]

I tried to search, but could find any other way to make each individual particle connect to light probes or get affected by baked lighting, and I don't think perfectly lit dust clouds in dark area of the room look good. Maybe I am trying to do something that would not affect game experience that much, but I think it would be great to see

[fiery creek]

unity_SpecCube0 keeps being assigned the UnityBlackCube map despite there being a valid reflection probe in the scene, what's causing this?

[wintry glacier]

Not sure if this is the correct place to ask but I have a problem. I built an item pickup that has billboarding. I have this problem where the item seem to remain "lit-up" even though I disabled every lighting near it.

this is the code i used for the billboard effect

using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class Billboard : MonoBehaviour
{
    private SpriteRenderer theSR;
    
    void Start()
    {
        theSR = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
    }

    void Update()
    {
        transform.LookAt(PlayerController.instance.transform.position, -Vector3.forward);
    }
}

[chilly kettle]

Why dont you use the unity integrated billboard system?

For your lighting issue, what kind of shader do you use?
Is it unlit?

[wintry glacier]

1. I'm testing that right now
2. Universal Render Pipeline/2D/Sprite-Unlit-Default

[chilly kettle]

Unlit means it always has just one brightness. Ignoring all lights.
If you use a "lit" shader, it will be lit by light sources (and will be dark if there is no light source)

[graceful canyon]

Hello! I have a peculiar problem. Yesterday i fiddled around with lighting in my game, tried alot of things, but everything went wrong, so i tought... i can just reset it anddelete the "Lighting Settings Asset", and clear the baked lighting. Problem solved, everything looks good. But if i press play in the game, and stop, the lighting is screwed once again, and everything is dark. Anyone got a nice fix or things i can fiddle with to solve this :D?

[wintry glacier]

Ok I did some testing, apparently the lighting doesn't work if I have the billboarding script enabled

It works fine without it

[chilly kettle]

can you show a gif/video how it behaves? ^^

[chilly kettle]

Do you have realtime or baked lighting in your scene?

[wintry glacier]

give me a minute

[graceful canyon]

It is only in the Window -> Rendering -> Lighting i have been fiddeling, and what i can see, im using "Lighting Mode" Shadowmask

And i have the standard Directional Lighting-object in the scene, that comes everytime you start a new project

[chilly kettle]

So..i guess you need to learn what kind of lighting methods you can use before we start with finding your problem ^^
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rxMdiCkQGk&t

[graceful canyon]

Cheers! 😄

[wintry glacier]

sorry for the delay @chilly kettle but here are the recordings

[wintry glacier]

nvm i fixed it

thanks for the suggestion of using the billboard shader instead

[chilly kettle]

how did you fix it? ^^

[wintry glacier]

i followed this tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM_Dc9LqHJU&t=5s

and then i added this node to render the texture

it works perfectly but it still has a few problems

[chilly kettle]

alright ^^

[wintry glacier]

the sprite is supposed to have a transparent background but it has a black background for some reason

[chilly kettle]

Make sure to use alpha / alpha clipping in your shadergraph

[wintry glacier]

Nice its all good now!

[rotund sparrow]

Why am I getting these horrendous shadows with baked lighting? I don't think I've ever had this before it just popped up today

Lightmap Resolution didn't help and direct samples helped a bit. It just made the blocks smaller but they're still noticeable

[chilly kettle]

Can you show the baked lightmap itself

[rotund sparrow]

Yeah give me a sec

Was kind of hoping discord would embed that since it's really tiny.. I'll just convert it to a png quick

The padding is weird in the converted image what

I don't really know how to show you the actual lightmap lmao

Oh there we go

[chilly kettle]

First it looks like you have a bunch of unused areas there? and the place where your shadows are is very tiny compared to the size.
its a 1k Lightmap, so your shadows may have 100x100 texels there?
Thats not much and thats why your shadows are so pixelated

[rotund sparrow]

Is there a way for me to give them more room to work with?

It's a really small prototype scene so I'm not surprised there's unused areas

[chilly kettle]

You could

• Increase Lightmap Resolution (even if 40 is ok)
• make sure stuff you dont see or wont notice in the game to take less space

Not sure what all these rectancles are in your lightmap

[rotund sparrow]

Every object is a cube I'm guessing that's why

I just tried increasing the lightmap resolution and it doesn't look like it's helped sadly

[chilly kettle]

If you increase it from 40 to 100 it should have an effect.

But more important is, not to have the unused sides of your cube there.
Make the cube a plane, if its just the ground ^^

[rotund sparrow]

Yeah seems like I'm gonna have to because the alternative it waiting my lifespan for baking lol.. I hate to say it but 100 lightmap resolution seems to have done nothing except make the baking timer longer lol

The scene is only for testing movement I can bare without baked lightmaps for now I guess. I should start making the map soon anyways

[chilly kettle]

sure, baking lights is normally one of the last things you do.
you could do test bakes between with maybe a resolution of 5 or something to have an idea how it could look like later

[rotund sparrow]

Oh god yeah uhh

Switching the ground out for a quad made the shadows SO much nicer

The difference is night and day lol

[chilly kettle]

Unity tries to have all faces of a mesh on one Lightmap
And if its limited to 1024 it has not enough space for detailed shadows

i guess your quad will not fill way more of the lightmap as before

[deft fiber]

@rotund sparrow Baked lightmaps are fundamentally bad at sharp shadows
You can juggle that limitation by increasing the size in lightmap for surfaces where shadows fall, and decrease it for ones where they don't, even drastically

You could even split your meshes into individual objects rather precisely around the shadows
So a big empty flat side of the cube could take extremely few pixels in the lightmap, whereas the area in the middle of it where the shadow is can take up most of it

Normally you'll also have textures on the ground and walls which can work very well to hide the limitations of the lightmap

Lightmap artifacts, color banding and pixel edges are basically impossible to hide on solid color surfaces

In such situations you'd usually use mixed lighting to get realtime direct shadows

[scarlet geyser]

||shadowmask||

[deft fiber]

That is one option I refer to with mixed lighting

[fiery creek]

Just want to bump this if I may as it's continuing to confound me, and upgrading to Unity6 hasn't helped at all. All shaders just seem to default to using the basic unity skybox even when there's another reflection probe in the area.

[deft fiber]

There's no obvious logical reason how that should or could be happening that I can think of
By "run the game" do you refer to Play mode, build, or both?

Upgrading editors usually makes things worse, not better, since the process can break things internally

What I'd do in that situation is create a fresh URP project with the same or newer editor, then just repeat the steps of making a reflective object and a custom reflection probe to see what they do

[golden crow]

Mixed lighting issue...

My setup:
i have mixed mode spot lights in my scene. all geometry is marked static.

My Goal:
I want: shadows, direct, indirect lighting all baked. but i also want specularity which mixed light mode should allow for.

My issue:
mixed light mode spot lights wont bake shadows. they bake every aspect of lighting well but only allow for realtime shadows.

[deft fiber]

With what Mixed Lighting Mode?

Mixed lights don't exactly let you bake direct light or direct shadows, because otherwise you wouldn't get specular or any shading besides diffuse from the light, which can't very well be occluded without realtime shadows
Shadowmasking may be what you're hoping for but I'm not sure what you want exactly

[golden crow]

i will put it very simple: imagine realtime lighting without shadows, i want that on top of the baked lighting (i want shadows to be baked as well)

currently when i bake with mixed light mode on spot lights, i get baked lighting with realtime shadows.\

[deft fiber]

The closest thing to that would be to bake mixed lights with shadowmasking, and disable shadows on dynamic mesh renderers

Shadowmask is the only type of "baked shadow" that's capable of occluding realtime lighting like specularity

Though its main purpose is to enable you to use realtime shadows correctly with baked indirect lighting

If the direct shadows and indirect shadows were baked onto the same lightmap, your mixed lights would not have any information to what parts of the environment are occluded from them

This is why each light needs its own shadowmask in shadowmask mode

[golden crow]

just to clarify even even better what i want: baked lighting with baked shadows + realtime lighting benefits of seeing specularity and normal maps on materials.

[deft fiber]

I guess you would do it as I suggested

[golden crow]

i will try shadowmask bake mode now

[deft fiber]

Not sure if it'll work entirely as expected, or be worth the performance

[golden crow]

i have many lights in the scene and right now it says it doesnt support more than 4 overlapping lights

im making the game for mobile devices as well btw

[deft fiber]

Indeed
As I mention every light needs its own shadowmask which exist on a texture that has 4 color channels

If you draw a shadowmask onto the lightmap, its purpose is to occlude specular and other shading from a specific light, so it must be tied to that light

If direct and indirect shadows were together on a color texture, the lights wouldn't know when their reflections are occluded from the camera

And the specularity would appear to ignore shadows, shining through objects

Shadowmask is fundamentally a more expensive technique, because it adds extra textures that must be used in each light calculation, so it isn't usually a viable technique to use on mobile at all

But who can say without testing

[golden crow]

wow. ok. so if im going for the baked ligthing and shadows, i must forget about specular and normal? what you said is bad news because that would make the game bigger in size as well

[deft fiber]

Yes, it's giving up that or giving up shadows
There is such a thing as directional lightmaps that allows the lightmaps to respond to normal maps, but the effect is subtle and that's another set of extra textures that requires more shader instructions to use

But as with all things before you know for sure you would experiment to know what's possible and measure performance and build sizes

Guesstimating optimizations can be wildly off the mark

[fallen crater]

Is it just me, or does the lightmapper in Unity 6 LTS seem broken? I have a simple scene which when it bakes it takes 20-30 seconds when working correctly. If I make small changes and rebake, every other time it goes to a ridiculous long bake time, or if I try to cancel I get a GI.Tick popup window and and never goes away. So I have to force close Unity.

[deft fiber]

I have not encountered it, but upgrading to 6 can definitely break things in the project in a way that requires a Library deletion or in my case an entirely fresh project to fix

6 changed a lot in general so it well may have some bugs to report, as well

[fallen crater]

Thanks for the reply. This is a brand new project, just a probuilder courtyard, 2 shapes. I came back from lunch and the GI.Tick is still running, over an hour now...

[deft fiber]

I'd report it as a bug, and try with the newest Unity 6 in case too

[fallen crater]

That's what I'm running, the latest Unity 6 build (6000.0.23f1). I'll take your suggestion and file a report.

[deft fiber]

If you're desperate for a workaround or want a more complete bug report you could test with earlier 6 versions in that case then
I haven't used the newest .23f1 but I've baked lightmaps just fine in earlier 6 versions

[unique yarrow]

how should i adjust my sky and fog volume as well as my sun to get HDRP lighting like this?:

i tried gradient sky and it ended up looking off

i want to replicate the greyscale and lighting of super hot but the lighting doesnt seem as simple as it looks

[icy tundra]

Simple is hard :D

[shell juniper]

A well tuned gradient sky mixed with a directional light seems to be the whole setup, though lighting is probably baked

[unique yarrow]

so for sky i should use gradient?

[fiery creek]

Play mode in-editor. So this worked fine with the built in RP and stopped working when I moved to the URP

[unique yarrow]

im using hdrp and i dont know why my sky is jsut a blinding white. its hard to try and figure out lighting while this is happening

[fiery creek]

I'll try creating a project from scratch though and try again, good suggestion.

[deft fiber]

Usually this could happen because it's over-exposed
Common if you're missing any kind of exposure override, or your adaptive / fixed exposure is not correctly configured

But it could be an issue with the sky just as well, I suppose

[deft fiber]

This effect doesn't rely much on any unusual sky or lighting settings
The meat of the visuals in the environment is that it's using fairly ordinary lighting and normal mapped textures, but fullly nonmetallic and only white or some grey on the albedo channel, the rest is post processing like SSAO, color correction and the stripe overlay

The red and bluish shiny surfaces are probably only lit in their shader by a tinted cubemap, either reflection probe or custom, and potentially specular from light sources but not necessarily

[hybrid estuary]

I’m having trouble in unity 6

Whenever I start a bake it gets stuck at 56%

Then it just stays there

When I click cancel it starts loading and doesn’t stop until I force close it

What’s going on

The loading thing it does when I try and cancel is called gi.tick

[deft fiber]

What type of bake
Realtime GI, baked GI, APVs?
Which Unity version?

[hybrid estuary]

It’s in 6000.0.22f1 and it’s just a normal urp light bake with the apvs already baked all my lights are baked so there’s no mixed or realtime

Which is why I’m confused on why it’s not working

The only odd thing I have on is compatibility mode but that’s it

[deft fiber]

It seems someone else was having the issue just earlier today with .23f1 #archived-lighting message
So I would guess it's a proper bug affecting some of the newer versions of Unity 6

[hybrid estuary]

Should I just downgrade the version until the next new one comes out or until unity 6 officially releases

[deft fiber]

Likewise you could file a report, and if you want a workaround try downgrading the editor a few patches
I've been baking APVs on 6000.0.18f1 with no issues

2022.3. lts is of course more likely to not have bugs, but I would not downgrade an existing project that big of a leap

If it was necessary to go that far back I'd prefer to make a new project on that version and move the assets as a .unitypackage

[hybrid estuary]

I just downgraded it to the previous version of unity 6. Also I do t want to downgrade all the way to 2022.3 because it doesn’t have apvs

Now it’s working fine

[strong plank]

I thought it was just me, i was trying APV today and GI.Tick went for at least 30 minutes.

Baking the same terrain with Bakery, with Full lighting and Volumes took 45 BUT APV are meant to be fast.
Must be some kind of bug. No idea if its terrain related. I dont even use APV in this project but if it is a bug i hope they fix it

[wintry glacier]

Hello, I have this lighting issue on my sprites that uses a custom billboard shader. The upper half seems to be darkened even though I'm directly using a spot light on it. Some experiments shows that that half can only be lit up by only the directional light. Attached here is the screenshot of the problem and the custom billboard shader that I used.

(please ignore the obunga, its for testing purposes lol)

[stark temple]

You need to set the normals to also point towards the camera

[wintry glacier]

this is now what happens when i do that

[stark temple]

To be clear, the normals should still be perpendicular to the plane. Because you're moving the vertices in the first example but not adjusting the normals, they'll be pointed where they started. You need to basically rotate them in the same way that the plane rotates

it's difficult to see where the plane and the spot are in the image above though so I can't tell how it's wrong, I just presume the normals still aren't quite correct

[wintry glacier]

Ok i somehow managed to flip the shadow below by adding this

[deft fiber]

@wintry glacier this might work better
Shader Graph importable production ready shaders have a billboard shader for reference

[wintry glacier]

omg it works, thank you very much for your help

[fallen crater]

Seems like the latest version which dropped last night fixed my issue. Thanks for replying though.

[deft fiber]

That is good to know, and good that it got fixed quickly

[vestal agate]

Can you please tell me what can be associated with such graphic artifacts with the Adaptive Probe Volume?

[sick peak]

Are others finding the new Unity 6 Light baking to hang on larger scenes that it did not before, unless you restart before baking? I was on Unity 2022.3.10f1 and I bake on a 4090 with 24GB of VRAM. I broke up my large app (VR Theme Park) into 20 groups of scenes each balanced to not run our of VRAM when baking. Each group would bake in about 12 mins. On Unity 6, these same groups are taking the same amount of time to bake, but as I unload one group of scenes and open the next group, the second group one will not finish baking and just hang like it does when it runs out of video memory. I have to restart Unity, and then it will bake the next group fine. I have had to restart 20 times today whereas on Unity 2022.3.10f1 and all other pre Unity 6 versions it was fine. I have not played with the new GPU Profiles other than to leave on Auto.

[deft fiber]

Baking is broken in Unity 6 versions at least from .22f1 to .23f1
Could be related

[sick peak]

I am ub 23f1 and it works if I restart between bakes. Sucks. Feels like Unity 6 was rushed.

[deft fiber]

It's already fixed in .24f1

Coincidentally every LTS editor since 2020 had some randomly broken basic feature around the twentieth patch
But in those cases it took several days or even weeks before it was patched
So, this is going better than usual

[vital wren]

Just looking at the release notes, I don't see any reference to "light" or "bake". Where do you see this as being fixed? https://unity.com/releases/editor/whats-new/6000.0.24#notes

Is it this issue? https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/lighting-generation-freezes-the-editor-during-the-global-illumination-post-processing-stage-when-baking-lighting-on-certain-systems

If so, I think it's coming in 6000.0.25. No wonder i've had so many issues with baking.

[deft fiber]

I did not see it, but Digital Adam just a few messages above mentioned that the newest patch fixed the same issue which he was also having

[vital wren]

He may be having a different issue. Devs confirm fix is coming in .25
https://discussions.unity.com/t/u6-22f1-lightmapper-is-a-mess-random-crashes-and-freezes/1536458/30

[deft fiber]

It is possible
Many are reporting very similar problems during just these couple of days

But I have not been reproducing them myself

[vital wren]

From a technical perspective, is there a way Unity devs could implement a supervisor process for long-running processes like bakes that would detect no progress is being made and give you the option to bail out gracefully?

[deft fiber]

You normally can cancel a bake process, but in this case it seems the editor loop itself is hanging

[vital wren]

Having had to kill the Editor over a dozen times in the last week due to baking and other runaway processes is not fun.

[twilit dome]

So i have 2d tiles (basically sprites) that make up my ground and are properly affected by lighting. The problem is, if i change the color of that sprite, it doesn't change at all. I'm using the default URP Lit material

[deft fiber]

@sick peak @vital wren I'm using .18f1 and been baking APVs with it so I can at least vouch that it should also work, in case you don't want to wait for the patch

[jovial widget]

Surely this can't be normal that turning on 1 light with a cookie causes a spike like this the first time it's turned on. I tried all 3 Rendering Paths (Deferred, Forward and Forward+). Am I doing something wrong here? I'm on 2022.3 btw. The scene is as barebones as it gets... even disabled the directional light. It only does it the first time so maybe there's some optimization that I can do? (short of finding a hacky way how to turn it on/off without the player noticing). For context, this is on a flashlight not some scene light

[sick peak]

That might be my issue, but if I restart Unity 6 between each bake, it works. Only if I bake 1 group of scenes, then unload and load a different group of scenes to bake will it hang as descbried in the issue note. I am on a 4090. Thanks for the linked post

[teal vale]

hii all, did anyone know why my light projection looks like this?

[deft fiber]

Most commonly there's a problem with the normal map of the material
Typically the texture not being marked as type: normal map in import settings

[teal vale]

oooh thankyouu when i change the texture type to normal map as you said it being normal again . thankyou so much

[silent mortar]

does anyone know how I can use this function to get the color of my APV at a certain point?

there's basically no documentation on it so it's really strange

I just want to be able to get what light is being applied by the APV at a certain point, then send it to a compute shader

there's like a couple of references to this function on the internet but for the life of me i can't figure out how to access it or if it even works

but like , as simple as possible, i just want to be able to retrieve a color from a point based on APV, is there any way to do that?

[idle whale]

I'm creating a horror scene, and I need it to be very dark

What is the best solution to do this?

• Realtime lightning?
• Baking?

I tried volume probes, but all my rooms are lit by daylight while they are completely closed off from any light source

[safe fox]

you need to change the lighting settings to include less enviromental light from the skybox

it doesnt matter if baked or realtime for the darkness

if you dont need realtime, i would always go for baked or mixed

it just looks better

@idle whale

[idle whale]

I will look into that, thanks for the answers 😃

[idle whale]

Anyone can tell me what is the difference between Global and Scene ?
I see some rendering difference but i don't understand what is the best option

[scarlet geyser]

you can use the LightProbe method to get the color, it will work with APV

Vector3 objectPosition = transform.position;
SphericalHarmonicsL2 probe;
Vector3[] probeAngle = { Vector3.up, Vector3.right };
Color[] LightValue = new Color[probeAngle.Length];

LightProbes.GetInterpolatedProbe(objectPosition, null, out probe);

probe.Evaluate(probeAngle, LightValue);
Color color = LightValue[0];

for (int i = 0; i < material.Length; i++)
{
    material[i].SetVector("_RimLightColor", new Vector4(color.r, color.g, color.b, 1.0f));
}

[silent mortar]

maybe try a gradient sky set to black? if you're going for an indoor environment

you pretty much only want to use directional light for an outdoor scene

also i'd go with baked lights (if that's the style you want)

[silent mortar]

thank you so much lol, im gonna give this a shot

this shit had me digging into the HDRP code to expose that function, didn't realize it was that easy lol

[idle whale]

Thanks for the answer, im looking into that currently, im learning all the lighting environment (apv, etc)
My first time using baked light 😬

Building sky occlusion with the Sky Direction option to true seem to have some problem on my side
Anyone already encounter this problem ?

Why i get some square shadows when using it ?

[silent mortar]

to me that just looks like a super low resolution, maybe mess with your baking settings?

[silent mortar]

it's not recognizing the lightprobe methods, am I importing the right stuff?

[scarlet geyser]

that's weird

what Unity version do you use

[silent mortar]

i just upgraded to unity 6

i think it might be with my IDE? let me try something

[scarlet geyser]

I use Unity 6 too

[scarlet geyser]

try it in Unity

[silent mortar]

ok i think there's just something generally fucked up with my IDE bc it's having an issue with transform lol

give me one sec

[idle whale]

This is my current settings

[scarlet geyser]

uh, you should put this in the update function

[idle whale]

I only have this problem when enabling Sky DIrection to true

[silent mortar]

oh yeah ik, i just want to make sure it can actually work first lol

ohh wait that works, that was weird

[silent mortar]

btw any reason you store it as an array of colors?

there's practically 0 documentation for this as far as I can tell so i'm not entirely sure how it works under the hood lol

[scarlet geyser]

probe.Evaluate requires an array of colors

[silent mortar]

gotcha, thanks!

[silent mortar]

am I using this right? i'm testing it rn and it's only returning black

(i do have baked probes)

[scarlet geyser]

maybe try to bake with the virtual offset

[silent mortar]

i am, not sure why they're getting stuck

but at any position the light probes are returning black, rn i'm just getting the mesh position and sending it to the probe sampler

(i'm directly setting the shader color to the probe color just to test)

[scarlet geyser]

it works for me (here I use fresnel with power set to 0)

[scarlet geyser]

try using Vector4 instead of Color in the shader

[silent mortar]

ohh lemme try

you're in hdrp btw right?

[scarlet geyser]

yes

[silent mortar]

could i see your code? is it just what you sent earlier?

bc the script I have to sample the probes is the issue it seems, it's returning nothing as the color

[scarlet geyser]

are you in the play mode

[silent mortar]

it is setting the alpha to 1 so it's picking up something

yeah

[scarlet geyser]

[ExecuteAlways]
public class LightProbeColor : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] private Material[] material;

    private void Update()
    {
        if (material == null) return;
        
        Vector3 objectPosition = transform.position;
        Vector3[] probeAngle = { Vector3.up, Vector3.right };
        Color[] LightValue = new Color[probeAngle.Length];

        LightProbes.GetInterpolatedProbe(objectPosition, null, out var probe);

        probe.Evaluate(probeAngle, LightValue);
        Color color = LightValue[0] * 0.0001f;
        color = new Color(color.r * color.r, color.g * color.g, color.b * color.b);
        
        for (int i = 0; i < material.Length; i++)
        {
            material[i].SetVector("_RimLightColor", new Vector4(color.r, color.g, color.b, 1.0f));
        }
    }
}

[silent mortar]

and you're using APV?

[scarlet geyser]

yes

[silent mortar]

hm that's really odd

i'll just mess around with it for a bit, i really appreciate the help

[scarlet geyser]

the color in the inspector doesn't work for me either

it's just white

but the color I set in the shader works fine

[silent mortar]

hm, there's a split second where it registers something, then it just shifts to black

that's just copy n pasting the code you sent, so it might be something with my probe volume then?

[silent mortar]

if you don't mind could I see your APV settings?

[scarlet geyser]

it stopped working for me lol

[silent mortar]

oh lmao

[silent mortar]

ok so I was able to find what I needed to actually utilize this HLSL function, so i'm gonna see if I can write it as my own compute shader

[scarlet geyser]

what is this file

[silent mortar]

that's the compute shader i'm writing, you just need to inclue ProbeVolume.hlsl in the file and you should be able to use it

need to figure out how to actually use it bc there's literally 0 documentation but it should be alright lol

[scarlet geyser]

I wonder if I can make a custom SG node with this

[silent mortar]

potentially, i got sent down this whole rabbit hole bc for WHATEVER REASON you can't use the Baked GI node on an unlit shader

[scarlet geyser]

Baked GI is Baked GI Lightmap

this is not an APV probe color

[silent mortar]

ik, i'm doing my own lighting system for dynamic objects in my game and I wanted to be able to sample the indirect lighting in the scene

for a lit shader you can just use the baked GI node, but since it doesn't work unlit i'm having to go through the probes directly

[silent mortar]

update: yes https://streamable.com/ig1mdk

was able to sample it like this, just plug in the world position of the mesh

and I just made it a custom sg node

[scarlet geyser]

I need it

[silent mortar]

#include "Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.core/Runtime/Lighting/ProbeVolume/ProbeVolume.hlsl"
#define EVAL_APV
#ifdef EVAL_APV

void EvaluateProbes_half(in float3 posWS, in float2 positionSS, out float3 bakeDiffuseLighting){
EvaluateAdaptiveProbeVolume(posWS, positionSS, bakeDiffuseLighting);
}

#endif

you can just put that right into an .hlsl file

and plug it into a custom node with the right input/outputs

it is just a solid color though, you don't get the per-pixel benefit from APV

but for me that's all i needed lol

[scarlet geyser]

thanks dude

[silent mortar]

no problem, this was driving me fucking nuts lol

[scarlet geyser]

I'll use it for a slight outline for my character

[silent mortar]

oo yeah that'd look nice

from what I can tell the screen space position doesn't have any effect over it so I don't think you'd have to even define that in the node

i'm sure it does something but it doesn't seem important for this purpose

[silent mortar]

finally have a pretty solid lighting system going https://streamable.com/dduel9

[scarlet geyser]

it doesn't work for me

@silent mortar

[long spear]

@scarlet geyser in this code you have _half, but the custom function is expecting _float because it's either set to single or default

Try setting the "precision" there to half, or change your code to _float

[scarlet geyser]

nvm, it just randomly started working

I js rewrited the include line lol

idk how that helped but meh

[long spear]

You sure you didn't change the precision on any node?

[scarlet geyser]

yes, it's still inherit

[long spear]

How about the ones it inherits from?

Not a pro in this either, but been fiddling with the same stuff recently

[silent mortar]

was there an issue with the path maybe?

[scarlet geyser]

no, it was the same

[silent mortar]

you also have to do it in a sorta particular order so maybe you just swapped things around correctly

it was pretty finicky for me too lol

[silent mortar]

btw @scarlet geyser i was wrong, before I was just sending in the mesh center as the point to evaluate light probes from, which did mean that you would just get one solid color as the ambient light

but i forgot fragment shaders can do per-pixel calculations, so just sending in the absolute world position from the fragment shader lets you get the blending of colors you get from APV

(the sphere is using the shader, it's unlit)

[scarlet geyser]

can you show the shader

[silent mortar]

it's a bit messy but here (i'll break it down into smaller pics lol)

this bit's for the matcap reflection affect if I want metallic parts

here's where i'm calculating the direct lighting using dot product, i have my own point light components that I can use to set the color/distance/range variables per material instance

then I add the light probe color to the dot product color, and multiply it by the base texture

in the matcap section i forgot why I sample the texture multiple times like that, but it also breaks if I don't so 🤷‍♂️

should probably clean it up but if it works it works lol

oh and this is the distance calculation for the light, but it's not working as intended rn so it's not final

[light trail]

hi there
i just have seen the size of lightning data stuff and i have a question: do i actually need to bake lightning?
i did it because in yt guide they said that this is how i can fix dark shadows when changing scenes at runtime

[prisma ferry]

Unity supports realtime lighting, so no. it depends on if you are targeting PC or Mobile/VR. for the later, yes

i am not familiar with dark shadow issues while changing scenes, so that may be something else entirely (my experience is limited there though)

[deft fiber]

The UI is confusing regarding this
If Realtime GI and Baked GI checkboxes both generate lightmaps when you hit Generate Lighting
Without them the scene ambient lighting is generated without any lightmaps, meaning global light probe and reflection probe, which are required to fix the dark lighting on scene change issue

[prisma ferry]

oh, that makes sense. i baked them for RTGI, so i did not recognize the issue

[sullen bone]

There are no lights in my project, yet, as you can see there is still somehow light and you can see the background

how can i make it pitch Black?

Also, as you can see, some items and Gameobjects are somehow also not affected by the darkness

[deft fiber]

It's the Environment Reflections

[sinful pendant]

how should I light up this area

[misty olive]

how do I make this thing use lighting? I've tried to remove all lighting but I can still see the quad

the material is 2d sprite lit default in URP

[misty olive]

I figured it out

just needed to put a global light in the scene and reduce the intensity to 0

[loud gazelle]

how do I exclude an object or a material from the lightmap?
I have 3 Scenes, S1, S2 (an elevator that is additivly and won't be unloaded) and S3.
When I enter the Elevator S1 and S3 are switched, but the switch is obvious as the lighting and colors inside of the elevator change

[deft fiber]

Make it not "lightmap static"

[sick peak]

Is 6000.0.24f1 having even more light baking issues than previous versions as mine just bakes indefinitely with scenes that baked fine before?

[deft fiber]

Yes
Fixes may be coming in .25f1
I've been able to bake fine with .18f1 so that should work in a pinch

I believe the problems started at .22f1, or potentially some version between that and 18

[sick peak]

Thank you. I did not realize 24f1 was not the fix. Any word when 25f1 will be out?

[deft fiber]

Don't know if there's official word on it, but I'd expect it within a week or maybe two

[gritty fox]

Alright, still stuck with these light baking artifact issues and I havent found a way to fix it. Not sure what to do at this point, please help. Dont think even chat gpt could save me lol
I have now:

-Created the 2nd channel and unwrapping there also tried lightmap pack in blender
-tried making these kickboards on separate objects and still the same issue.
-remade the entire walls
-rebaked lighting with sample counts from 32 up to 256
-rebaked with both 1024 and 2048 max lightmap size
-increased bounces up to 8
-Increased lightmap res up to 60
-increased padding up to 8
-decreased scale in lightmap on the walls
-Rebaking and changing the filtering between auto, gaussian and A trous on both openImageDenoise and Optix
-Rebaked with both progressive updates and importance sampling.
-Rebaked with generate lightmaps both on and off with no change.

Also reset to defaults and rebaked, no changes. Is there any chance Unity 6 will have any help with these baked lighting artifacts issues? This is driving me insane and has been the only issue ive had such a LONG TIME trying to fix

[deft fiber]

Since the issue seems to always repeat in the one scene with the one specific mesh, I'd try to isolate the problem more thoroughly

If you pop in default cubes of various sizes in various places and they show the same artifacts, you'll know the issue is not with the mesh

If you drag the room to a new scene or a new scene in a new project and bake without issues, you'd know the issue is with the scene or the project

If this method implicates the mesh as the issue, you could try remaking a part of it from scratch, and or modifying the shape of the baseboards to try to confirm if the geometry is the issue

Recall that UV seams and small geometry surfaces are problematic for baking, so having the wall and baseboard be one continuous UV region (and continuous manifold mesh if they aren't already) is one potential solution
But only if it seems the mesh is the issue

[sick peak]

I have found any "planes" in the area can cause these exact issues. I am not sure why Unity struggles with planes, but it does. The Bakery asset does not have this issue

[forest nymph]

In case anyone here has experience with using Bakery. Tried with few other render modes, pretty much same issues.

Images from left to right.

Image 1) Right before Bakery finishes the render, this is more closer to the result I wanted.
Image 2) When Bakery finished rendering, everything pretty much turns to dark/darker.
Image 3) As a test:

• Disabled MeshRenderer on all parts of the arena that Bakery complained about overlapping UV maps.

Also tried:

• Disabled environment reflections from most of the scene materials, also disabled scene reflection probe.
• Changed skybox (also tried without skybox)

Same results

Any ideas?

[gritty fox]

Okay thanks. I haven't used planes anywhere but I did recreate the a few of these walls from scratch already. I have even separated these walls from the rest to see if I could find anything specific on them.

It seems to just be any wall like this, which is just plain colors.

I will try default cubes and another scene although this seems to be an issue in 2 other scenes with plain walls like these.

I'll also give the last suggestion a try.

Thanks for the suggestions

[mental dome]

Can someone explain what is this artifact happening with spot light, its only rendering to part of the screen?

[deft fiber]

It's not a typical problem, but I'd guess it's related to rendering path

Which Unity version is it and which rendering path (forward, forward+, deferred)

[mental dome]

I got a bit more info about it, its from 6000.0.23f URP using Forward+ it only happens with large angle spotlight and camera near plane of 0.01 i checked past version and this bug did not exist

[deft fiber]

Worth reporting then, if it isn't already

[mental dome]

Yes its a bug even last version has it

[tired inlet]

Any adaptive probe wizards here to explain to me why it's not usable in my situation

Adaptive probes are pretty great, so I am experimenting with using them as the main indirect lighting set up for my scene

But I can't get them to not be spotty

This makes it unusable in my scenario

I'm baking them at a relatively dense spacing to try and match a little closer to the definition I can get out of lightmaps

But even at crazy samples and 12 bounces I can't get them to be coherent enough to create a smoother result

[sinful pendant]

It in unity 3D, a pool table

[sinful pendant]

its

[tired inlet]

Start by adding a point light over top

[tired inlet]

But yeah comparing all of this to the fidelity I get out of lightmaps ^

Are adaptive probes just not usable for indoor scenarios with a lot of indirect lighting, or am I doing something wrong?

[deft fiber]

@tired inlet Render pipeline?

[tired inlet]

That would be a shame because I'd love to make a more dynamic scene for my game by adding time of day that can scenario blend

HDRP

[tired inlet]

Also hey Spazi, my unity rock ❤️

Now I understand that adaptive probes will have some limitations, but with 8k samples and 12 bounces the results should be a lot smoother than this

If I bake a lightmap at those settings it will be the smoothest thing in the world

[deft fiber]

Should be, I think
Unfortunately my results have been just as blotchy with what little I've used APVs

[tired inlet]

Yeah it's really unfortunate

It's a major improvement over using the previous light probe solution for lighting characters and other non static items

But I was really hoping this would help me realizing day night cycle as that's what it's getting advertised for

All the samples I've seen from unity were outdoors though

[deft fiber]

The only clue I have about the blotches is that they occur at probes near walls
Empty space is fine

Light probe sample multiplier helps, but make sure to enable it

[tired inlet]

I'll check it out

I only gotten it as smooth as those results by upping the dilution, but that is at cost of lighting detail too so it's not great to keep increasing that

[deft fiber]

Realtime GI / Enlighten is still more capable for dynamic lighting changes than APVs
APVs support prebaked lighting scenarios, dynamic sky occlusion, but not yet relighting or other types of "true" day night cycling

[tired inlet]

Yeah I was just attracted to the reduction in rendering cost over realtime GI

To hit the minimum hardware requirements my game is supposed to hit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpVuIZYFRg4

[deft fiber]

Samples 32, 512, 256 with a multiplier of 2 versus 32 respectively
It can be bruteforced to some extent

[tired inlet]

In this demo they show off how you can utilize it for a day night cycle with scenario blending and some coding

[tired inlet]

Nice I'll give it a go

I thought it was weird that it was grayed out, but I just thought it was a limitation of the adaptive probes

Turns out it was a limitation of me neglecting to hover over it

Yeah that seems to improve the results quite a bit!

It's still a little blotchy at

But I'm sure if I up it some more I could get a decent result

[scarlet geyser]

damn, where have you been before

[deft fiber]

Right here ^^

But I'm considerably behind in familiarizing all the newest lighting stuff

[scarlet geyser]

do lightmap samples affect APV?

[deft fiber]

I believe they use the same samples multiplied by the probe sample multiplier

[scarlet geyser]

yep, it's true, good to know

[tired inlet]

yeh

[quiet egret]

Hello. I downloaded the HD RP from package manager, and now all my area lights are point lights, even thought the scene is URP. Am I dumb? I cannot change them back to Area Lights.

[deft fiber]

That's a bit confusing
Every render pipeline supports area lights in some capacity, and the choice shouldn't affect your ability to choose light type at all
But more importantly what render pipelien are you trying to use?

HDRP and URP cannot coexist in the same project

At least not practically

[quiet egret]

So i have a scene, which is a store that uses area lights. Prior to installing HDRP, no lightmaps were baked. After installing, lights in multiple of my URP scenes look different, and in this URP scene, the area lights are now point lights. When i click to change to Area, it just goes back to Point. Cant imagine why this is happening since this scene is not HDRP and should not of been affected by the install

I can provide a video or something if that helps

[deft fiber]

Render pipelines are not per scene

[deft fiber]

That could be helpful

[quiet egret]

Creating a new area light works fine

[deft fiber]

It could be important to see your Graphics and Quality settings as well, for clarity about the render pipelines

[deft fiber]

You cannot have HDRP and URP in the same project at the same time

I expect that's why it breaks

[quiet egret]

So i would need to remake this scene in HDRP?

Thats annoying but understandable

[deft fiber]

Nothing to do with scenes
Uninstall either URP or HDRP and make sure the remaining render pipeline is configured, not just installed

[quiet egret]

Ahhh

I will uninstall URP and get back to you

[deft fiber]

Configuration instructions pinned in #archived-hdrp

There's no automatic converter between the two scriptable render pipelines, only from built-in RP to either HDRP or URP, so you may need to fix all the leftover changes manually one by one

It's recommended to use version control software so that the render pipeline process is possible to be reversed if needed (and also just in general)

[quiet egret]

Thank you!

[rose hamlet]

does anyone know how to fix this? im using baked lighting and urp.

[rose hamlet]

also in unity 6

[dawn pawn]

Send the lighting settings please
It looks like the shadow is just very low res or maybe the renderer shadowmap sizes are not optimized

[rose hamlet]

here

[dawn pawn]

Maybe it could be that the low quality compression makes it this way?

[rose hamlet]

should i try and raise it to high quality?

that didnt help.

[deft fiber]

What type of baked lighting
APVs or light probe groups?

[rose hamlet]

how am i supposed to tell? sorry im new

[deft fiber]

Do you recall making either Adaptive Probe Volumes or Light Probe Groups into your scene

If you don't know, probably not APVs
Try diagnosing for texel invalidity using Scene window debug views https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GIVis.html
And if you find red stuff rather than green there, apply solutions from chapter 15 of https://discussions.unity.com/t/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide/895352

[silent mortar]

are you using APV with baked GI? or just APV

[tired inlet]

Right there just APV to see if it would be possible to use as the sole lighting solution for baked GI

Because I was trying to see if I could use the scenario blending feature for day/night scenarios without having to load different lightmaps instead

[silent mortar]

ah ok, gotcha

[tired inlet]

I can't really get the quality of the APV's close enough to where I need it to be for my project, so I'll be sticking to lightmaps for static baked lighting. APV's still for characters and other dynamic objects, etc

[silent mortar]

if it helps, these are my APV settings, i've never had artifacting like that

[tired inlet]

What kind of scene though?

[silent mortar]

just a static environment, i'm not doing any day/night stuff but I don't see why that would cause artifacting

[tired inlet]

Interior or extrior I meant

[silent mortar]

oh, interior

this is with APV and Baked GI

[tired inlet]

Using only APV's?

[silent mortar]

this is with just APV

is your mesh set to recieve from light probes?

[tired inlet]

Yeah

The issue is that I have way more dense probes set up

At .3 spacing with dense geomety I think

[silent mortar]

i'm getting these results when the environment is recieving from lightmaps, maybe give that a shot?

this is my density

[tired inlet]

Yeah for your environment that looks great

[silent mortar]

maybe see if you get that issue at a lower density, then amp up from there?

[tired inlet]

But this is the quality I get from lightmaps

[silent mortar]

damn that's nice

[tired inlet]

And I can't get the APV's close enough to that to take the compromise

[silent mortar]

you're inherently gonna get a better result with fully baked lightmaps

but you should be able to fix the artifacting at least somehow

[tired inlet]

Yeah I knew that from the start, but since my game takes place at different times of day I was trying to see if APV's could be a compromise to get that functionality

I've been able to reduce the artifacting, but at the 0.3 distance granularity (which I need to get a little closer to lightmap quality) I'll still get some of that splotchyness

Incresing the probe sample multiplier and adding 1 dilution iteration helped a bunch with that

But unfortunately I can't rely on it completely with how much better results I can get from lightmaps

Thanks for the help though 🙂

[shell juniper]

Increase the light probe sample multiplier. It's undersampling that's all. Increasing the density generally just makes the noise denser.

[tired inlet]

Yeah did this until about 32 times multiplied

It was still noisy, just a lot less

But thanks for the input!

[silent mortar]

my lighting system can do multiple lights now ‼️ ‼️ https://streamable.com/1vi98d

i'm just hard coding "light slots" into the shader that are all added together in the result

then whatever lights are in the scene fill the slots sequentially based on distance

[deft fiber]

Unity already has functions for these, which you can get custom nodes for from here: https://github.com/Cyanilux/URP_ShaderGraphCustomLighting

In URP anyway, HDRP also has the functions but they're probably different

And alternativelly you have the Production Ready Shaders you can import from Shader Graph samples that are reconstructions of Lit shaders within SG for both render pipelines
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@17.0/manual/Shader-Graph-Sample-Production-Ready.html

[pallid crane]

I'm running into an issue with baked lighting that I can't get my head around, hoping someone here has any ideas?
The issue I'm running into is that I am trying out baked lighting on an existing project and I have a scenes setup with baked lighting and it looks great. But if I do a standalone build, the baked lighting just doesn't show up at all, only realtime lights seem to work in a build.

I've tried searching around for options and I have tried resetting graphics/quality settings, messing around with post processing/shader stripping and all the lighting settings I can think of but nothing seems to have made any difference. For what it's worth I am using URP and Unity 2022 LTS. Anyone have any suggestions or run into anything like this?

[hollow chasm]

Anyone have any idea where to start with this? I'm talking in the video explaining it

[silent mortar]

it was more an excercise in learning a system like that, but I am really happy with ther esult rn

i'm already using an HDRP function to evaluate my APV at a point, if I wanted realtime shadows I might do more with that though

i'll def check out the production ready shaders though

been really liking doing my own system like this though, been learning a lot

[soft siren]

Maybe you can modify your prefabs adding a self-duplicated object, but that second object will be set as Shadows only and in the ground layer, this way the object will be invisible and only rendering the shadows, and your main object can be set as Rendering shadows off to avoid double shadow caster for that prefab. Also this way you can modify the shadow position if is needed giving you more flexibility, because the second object will be invisible always but not his shadow.

[polar wadi]

Hello, I'm using HDRP with SSGI with fully dynamic models loaded a runtime directly, so I can't bake lights. Here is what I have to far after loading my models dynamically :

Overall the walls and floor are OK but the ceiling is not lit properly

I'm using spot lights which lights straight down but I was expecting the light to bounce back to the ceiling and lit it much more

Is there something I'm missing in the volume settings or is it not possible to have proper hdrp dynamic global illumination with dynamic content in Unity ?

[final frost]

Hi! Is it possible to have a custom clear for point light shadows?
I have mostly static world geometry that updates only once in a while and want to render that once to a "clear" texture.
then every frame render all dynamic shadowcasters on top, using the pre-rendered clear depth buffer

[slender light]

Is there any way to make it so that an object casts shadows on itself, and receives them from level geometry, but does not cast its own shadows on anything?

[gritty fox]

im still getting this everywhere and Im not even using probes or on unity 6 im using another lts version of unity

[gritty fox]

resuming where I was last time, changing scenes, using default cubes, new lighting settings etc etc still changes nothing at all

is it now time to make a support request to unity at this point? Ive tried everything on that list and now going fresh but still no luck in getting rid of these splodgy artifacts. i dont know what else I can possibly do

[rotund sparrow]

Working with URP does anyone know if it's possible to make soft shadows actually soft?

I wouldn't really consider this soft lmao

I know HDRP has something for this but HDRP has just been a nightmare for me ever since that weird volume profile update. There's no turning back now anyways

Wait no nevermind I guess all lights just default to low quality shadows for no reason lol...

[polar wadi]

Hello, I'm trying to get the room lit by the directional light only. I've maxed all sliders I could find thinking it would brighten the room but it basically do nothing. How do I get the room lit without using ambient light?

[polar wadi]

Ok so increasing the indirect multiplier on the directional light itself did lit up the room, but it's basically all uniform now which is no different from ambient light, this makes no sense... Shouldn't the corners or the walls have a small gradient of shadow at least?

[deft fiber]

With lighting settings as wack as those, that makes perfect sense

I don't understand what you mean by light the room without using ambient light
What do you expect ambient light to do

[deft fiber]

What is the weird volume profile update?

[polar wadi]

From my understanding, GI is supposed to simulate light bouncing so I'm expecting light to bounce on the floor and lit the room but not in an evenly form.

Isn't that what it's supposed to do ?

Ambient light will light up all texture equally which I'd like to avoid.

[deft fiber]

With baked GI that is not the case, it's just the light from the sky that gets occluded like any other

But I see you've got realtime GI, baked GI and mixed lights all enabled and I cannot tell from your screenshot which system is doing exactly what

I recommend you start with just one

[polar wadi]

Oh, I see. I misunderstood then.

Got it, I'll test more with individual settings to better understand then.

But from what you said, it's not possible with only one directional light to have something close to really life then ? A dark room lit by the sun from a single window and the walls would be unevenly lit ?

[deft fiber]

It is perfectly possible

You rarely need both realtime GI and baked GI at the same time, especially since they're both lightmapping systems designed for different purposes
So pick one

Both simulate bounce lighting and ambient occlusion on static geometry

Realtime GI is worse in many ways, but it works with realtime light sources which is totally impossible with other baking systems

If you choose Baked GI, set your light sources to Baked from Mixed for now
since mixed lights have whole another layer of quirks and technical limitations

[languid blaze]

Realtime lights have these really pretty reflections at shallow angles. Unsurprisingly, these get lost when the lights are baked.

Adding physical "bulbs" for the reflection probe to pick up helps a little, but also results in obvious seams where you switch betwen probes.

I'm guessing there's not much I can do about this, right?

specular lighting will have to come entirely from the reflection probe, and the probe can't fully capture how the light looks from every angle

[deft fiber]

Indeed not
SSR and RTGI could be alternatives
But if you have to avoid realtime lights they probably aren't much of an option

[languid blaze]

This is for VRChat, and I want to keep the world very cheap to render, so yep

I think I'll use a few realtime lights

I just won't be spamming them like I did in those pictures

[night shell]

not sure if someone answered your question but the reason those artifacts are appearing is due to low sample counts. Its the same problem with APVs regardless of the system, the areas you have there just have too little amount of light in those areas, so as a result when thrown under filtering you will get blotchy artifacts. You fix it by either disabling importance sampling in your lightmapping, or increase sample counts, or just add more light to that area

if you are also using emissive lighting as your main sources of light that is another reason why you could be getting alot of noise, because its harder to sample those than actual light sources. So if you are to get around that you supplement the "emissive lights" in your scene with actual unity lights and that should help

[night shell]

there are some things you can do to fix this

even for baked

yes you are right reflection probes aren't the best at capturing or retaining those highlights but some solutions do exist

https://github.com/zulubo/SpecularProbes
or this
https://github.com/frostbone25/Unity-Specular-Probes

[night shell]

in addition also bake your scenes using directional lightmaps, and use a shader that can calculate a specular term based off of the directional information. A shader I highly recomend for this is Silent's filamented - https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/filamented

you can use both of those techniques, the specular probes, and using the filamented shader and baking with directional lightmaps to help you retain specular highlights for baked lights in your scene

note that it won't be able to recreate the look 100%, but it can get you very close

[gritty fox]

Ty for the reply

So far I havent gone above 256

I've added default cubes closer to the light and they still had it, also I am using area/spot lights

I will try high sample counts and hopefully that really is just the issue.

[night shell]

is importance sampling on?

if it is turn it off

that should help

in addition increasing the bounce count also helps

[gritty fox]

I turned off both important and progressive

[deft fiber]

Do I understand correctly that this shader is a method for specular occlusion, specifically?

[gritty fox]

What's a good bounce count? I've been keeping it around 4-6 recently but I have gone up to 8 aswell

[night shell]

4 is usually the normal, but sometimes 8 is as high as one can go, any higher and usually in my experience there isn't much benifit

[night shell]

it has both, it has a method for specular occlusion, but it also has a method for calculating specular light, derived from the directional lightmaps

[languid blaze]

Interesting -- I tried toggling between directional and non-directional at one point and didn't see a change (using the Standard shader). I will have a look at this!

[night shell]

with the standard shader there isn't much of an effect, but also if you have materials that don't leverage normal maps then you pretty much wont see any difference usually using the unity standard shader and directional lightmaps

[languid blaze]

Specular Probes is also clever looking -- that'd save me from needing to put a giant emissive object on each light source

[night shell]

but if you use a better shader, i.e. the filamented I linked, it does a much better job and can actually calculate a specular term from it

but as I said keep in mind that you won't be able to replicate the same look 100%

but you can get it looking pretty close, close enough to satisfy

[languid blaze]

yeah, I'd be happy with getting any kind of glare at all

[night shell]

I recomend using both techniques, I do that in my scenes/projects and it gets you pretty good coverage

speuclar probes + custom shader with directional lightmap specular

[languid blaze]

filamented vs. filamented (specular setup)

neat!

(the smoothness wound up just being 1, oops)

that's mostly why it looks different. lemme mess with this some more

There we go, much more useful comparison: Standard vs. Filamented, both with a very high smoothness value set (I got rid of the original metalic+smoothness map)

[deft fiber]

It can get very funky

But I'm impressed that it does what it does with such limited information

[night shell]

that is one drawback with the method is that in certain situations you can get distorted highlights

its based off the same method used in the frostbite engine on battlefront

[languid blaze]

and yeah, baking non-directional light makes that shine go away

[night shell]

sent this before in the past but heres another

unity standard vs filamented

[languid blaze]

it says that it cuts down on the intensity of the fresnel effect

[deft fiber]

Is there some setting to get the specular occlusion seen here? Can't seem to get it out of the box

[languid blaze]

i'm guessing that's what darkened it here

oh, that'd also be specular occlusion, right

[night shell]

I tend to turn up the "exposure occlusion" as high as it can go, but the specular occluusion is dependent on the lighting in your scene

or the lightmaps

[night shell]

yep indeed

specular occlusion helps alot, which the standard shader lacks

[deft fiber]

One of my fave effects
Too bad URP and HDRP are getting on that train so slowly

[night shell]

for some people they might have seen these images before lmao but I repost them because they are good examples

this also here is a good example since you can see some stretched highlights on the fridge

its a tradeoff and a compromise that one has to make, with realtime lights sure you get perfect specular lobes, but with baked lighting you can still retain them, but it won't be the same and it will have some artifacts associated with it

unfortunately the only way to improve the effect is to use a different lightmapper

unity built in lightmapper has a very basic directional mode, a system like bakery has a few different that are more accurate and get you better results

but in the industry you can go further with directional information to a point where you could actually use them to replace reflection probes

https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/sg-series-part-5-approximating-radiance-and-irradiance-with-sgs/

[deft fiber]

This is just neat

[night shell]

glad to see I've enlightened a couple more people 😛

[deft fiber]

I think HDRP APVs do support this already, but URP's may be on the way yet
Not sure about specular response though

[scarlet geyser]

how

[safe fox]

Literally 1 message above this image

[atomic cypress]

Anyone that might have an idea why I have this weird shadow artifact witth baked lighting? As you can see the right wall is fine, but the left one has one dark stripe across it?

It only happens on that one wall. I already tried double checking the mesh in my modeling software and re-importing it, but no matter how I bake the lighting, I cant seem to get rid of this one artifact.

[thick cloud]

Does anyone know why the light from the back of the sprite renderer when using the spotlight in the front is brighter than the front of the sprite?
And the light from the spotlight back doesn't show any light on the sprite renderer?

[burnt nova]

I got Bakery in my project and used it to generate some lightmaps but Bakery comes with a !ftraceLightmaps game object
I need to remove that game object

I'm sending my scene with a custom SDK and they require me to remove !ftraceLightmaps

[deft fiber]

Not possible without custom lighting
https://t.co/qQ1JixahQ3
Which disables directional light attenuation so the geometry gets lit even when facing away from the light
Which you could also base on a texture map, so only the "rim" is unaffected
No need to crosspost on multiple channels

[thick cloud]

Sorry, about the crosspost.
but what do you mean by this? (Sorry I'm still learning) Which you could also base on a texture map, so only the "rim" is unaffected

[deft fiber]

A face's normal direction relative to incoming light is a value from 0 to 1, which normally is used to multiply the light so faces away from the light are dark
How much it does that itself could be multiplied by the sprite mask map

[scarlet geyser]

Can I ask which SDK?

[burnt nova]

Custom SDK to send booth's for a VR event

Vket

Right now I'm gonna try using 2 unity's

One to bake one and the other to submit

[burnt nova]

Found a solution

Using 2 Unitys and a custom shader

[sly fox]

Does anyone know why realtime-gi turns off when switching scenes?

[dawn pawn]

Maybe because they use different lighting settings?

[sly fox]

Oh I think I figured it, I'm pretty sure bakery was automatically turning it off

[vital river]

need some help

i baked probe volumes

baked lightning

over static meshes

but still there is no global illumination

not working

sorry my bad

i didnt check the directional light was realtime

i changed it to baked

it worked

[atomic cypress]

When light baking I get this artefact. When I make the wall smaller (less long) in my modeling software, the artefact disappears, but when it's the desired length I keep getting this. Could it be to big for the lightmap?

(The right wall shows the intended bake outcome)

I have other walls that are a similar length though? It's just this one causing issues

[spare pulsar]

Hello, in my vr project I added a point light it doesnt emit any light, when I change to directional it emits also in other non vr projects it works

[scarlet geyser]

because it doesn't even touch the floor

there is a range parameter

[spare pulsar]

I tried higher values but still nothing

[polar wadi]

Newbie question here, but regarding realtime vs baked lighting, don't most games use some objects which will move in the scene anyway? So realtime would always be the choice here, wouldn't it? I was told only one mode would usually be needed, is that also correct?

[upper fable]

Mixed Lighting

[polar wadi]

So most of the time would be mixed lighting ?

[atomic cypress]

Is there anyone here that has experience with using this script to set up baked lighting on prefabs?

https://github.com/Ayfel/PrefabLightmapping

[deft fiber]

"Most games" use such a variety of lighting techniques that they can't really be generalized

Baked lighting can affect dynamic objects via light probes

[tired inlet]

Can we fix baking please ❤️

It's been broken for the past two LTS versions in unity 6

Time just counts up infinitely baking at a relatively low frequency GPU baking on a RTX 4090

Small scene, few lights, etc

It'll be doing stuff, then utilization drops and memory stays high and it just starts counting up for however long I wait

The longer a bake would take the higher chance of it getting stuck it seems like

I used to bake this scene at resolution 80 with all the same settings and amount of lights/geometry I have now and be finished in 5 minutes for example

Now I have to do quick bakes at 40 just to get it to go through and have something

Just a rant, I'm sorry 😛

Maybe I have some weirdness going on in my scene, but exploring the baked lightmaps and authoring all the lights reveals nothing of the sort

I'll figure it out

[deft fiber]

If you mean 25f1 is broken for you as well, it might be best to stick to 18f1 before these issues began

[tired inlet]

Correct

Oh wait I'm on .24

I'll check 25

[deft fiber]

This seems to be listed as a known issue for 6000.0.25f1, for whatever it's worth
Specifically with forward+ rendering path
You may be able to get by with deferred in the meanwhile

[craggy zephyr]

can you create shadow behind your 2d object in unity, like a 2d circle for extra depth illusion.

[floral swallow]

Anyone know of a fix for these weird dark spots around a mesh? They seem to only be around my hands but they're just normal Skinned Mesh Renderers using a URP/Lit shader. ^^

[deft fiber]

Usually that requires another sprite, or a script that creates and manages them dynamically

[night shell]

its called ambient occlusion

whenever objects are close in proximity there is a shadowing/darkness that happens due to the occlusion of surrounding light

but what your seeing there is that, so just go through the URP settings and turn it off

[floral swallow]

Ah, that makes sense thank you! Do you know where i could disable it? Can't see it in the project settings or preferences

[night shell]

I'm not familiar with URP but should be in the render features list

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@10.0/manual/post-processing-ssao.html

in your case its already there so it should be removed

[craggy zephyr]

dropshadow it was called

totally forgot the name, xd

[tired inlet]

Well don't remove ambient occlusion completely, you just need to tweak the settings a little bit.

Reducing the radius and intensity a little should do the trick.

Ambient occlusion adds a lot of depth to an otherwise dull scene, so if your target system can afford it, I would always recommend keeping it!

[tired inlet]

Check out this link from David though for more info on it

[night shell]

you could always tweak it but with their original question I assumed with the way he described it he wanted to just flat out get rid of it

as for keeping it in your scene it depends on the lighting setup you have, we can get very nuanced lol but it just depends on alot of factors

[tired inlet]

Yeah that's fine, I just wanted to add my two cents on why I think you shouldn't just write it off because it's a powerful effect

[night shell]

in limited scenarios like pure realtime lighting I agree, but in different contexts i.e. with baked lighting or other similar GI techniques AO won't do much ontop

[tired inlet]

I don't completely agree with that

In mixed lighting scenarios you wouldn't just not use it because you baked some lightmaps

In a setting where you use just light probes to light a scene it can help to add back in scene depth that you could lose with that bekd lighting technique

If your game goes for some type of flat lighting/stylized style then sure it's not handy to have

But I don't see how in most scenarios it wouldn't be usefull to have at least some of it if the target hardware can swing the overhead

[floral swallow]

I ended up just disabling AO on that material by removing the texture and setting the slider to 0, I've yet to test if it actually worked

[tired inlet]

Ah, no that won't make a difference for seeing it interact between items. The texture on the material is just the faked ambient occlusion you can do in a material on the object itself. So for example some faked AO shadow between the grooves of the glove or something like that

David's link will point you to where it lives though

[floral swallow]

Looks like that's working great

It looks incredibly strange in VR to have your hand absorb all the light around it lol, I appreciate the pointer @night shell!

[tired inlet]

Good times!

[night shell]

writing a partial agreement rebutall to zigga lmao but I there is something else you could try if your willing to get an asset from the store

but your welcome

[tired inlet]

Oh my lets hear it haha, I'm all ears (in a friendly way)

[night shell]

I'm in partial agreement with you but the reason why I'm a little hesitant now towards AO is because I see it either overused too much or not used correctly. AO is a technique that is designed to help give the impression of "GI" but its not an end all solution and it should be used fairly lightly. In a scenario where you have baked lighting or even mixed lighting I'd argue that AO ontop would not be of use because the baked lighting (which depending on your setup is already providing GI), adding AO ontop would overdarken areas and corners that are already naturally darkened due to the GI term.

The only time adding AO makes sense in terms of accuracy is using it to blend dynamic objects with baked ones, or supplement a rather low frequency GI term (APVs are a good example) to provide smaller scale shadows. The downsides with AO (specifically SSAO) applies to the entire image in screenspace so regardless if something is baked or not you will end up with overdarkening in certain areas. Dynamic objects will have improved shading but not by much. SSAO also doesn't provide good enough crisp or defined shadowing that makes sense for what its supposed to be ultimately simulating.

I will also add the other time it makes sense to use again is in a pure realtime setting, so say you don't have access to any other GI terms, AO will 100% be your best friend for providing better shading at a realtively low cost.

Now granted no one is stopping you, stylistically you can choose to do that if you wish but my general TLDR; is if you use AO, use it sparingly and in small scale. But in limited scenarios i.e. what I described, but a

now as for the thing I was hinting at, one thing I've been working on personally implementing in my projects is this

https://github.com/frostbone25/Unity-Capsule-Shadows

its just for my own use even though it is public and on github but its a step beyond AO in my mind because it doesn't have the purely blobby shadowy look that you saw in Silk's video where it doesn't make too much sense, but it has more defined shapes, and not only that also its only for dynamic objects (so no applying extra shadowing to areas that don't need it), and it blends better with underlying scene if you are using baked lightmaps for example are providing GI/lighting to static objects

but thats just my opinon of course

example here on a character

[tired inlet]

Alright my turn

[night shell]

awww damn you bot

can't send that gif really?

oh well

I make it sound like AO is a totally bad thing, it isn't but tldr; there are cases where it makes sense to use it, but gotta be careful with it otherwise it looks funky/bad

[night shell]

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/analytic-soft-shadows-built-in-urp-189680?srsltid=AfmBOop3n3LfPnSeEaI5_EoPV_M7RbG3T6SljHCLQucgRRIO-KVX7TEP

this one works for URP

[floral swallow]

👀

They look pretty neat

[raven flower]

When using Unity I've been kind of perplexed to how they handle lighting. As far as I know, the lighting calculation is built-in and uses an approximation of the real-life lighting falloff (inverse square blabla).
Now, a LOT of games want custom lighting in Unity, and there isn't really, as far as I can tell, a recommended/optimal solution for this.
Creating custom shaders and calculating a new lighting for a specific shader seems to be the general solution for this (which for some reason still doesn't have a native implementation in Shader Graph???)
Lighting is currently calculated from individual lights, using this built-in falloff.
I don't know that much about lighting, but I'm curious why Unity went this route, and if they plan to revisit this part of graphics.
Having an option for linear falloff would make shaders easier to create, and allow for way easier manipulation of lighting. Is there anything in the roadmap for anything related to lighting at all? The only thing I've seen is possibly adding two nodes for lighting in the Shader Graph.

[floral swallow]

I do not have any experience with lighting or environments, seems like that might help out a lot though

Well, I can press bake lighting and hope for the best

[night shell]

the reason there isn't really a recommended/optimal solution for it is because it depends on the project. The project you are making defines the restrictions/parameters and assumptions you can make for lighting.

as for custom lighting and rendering unity also has scriptable render pipelines

so if you want to handle lighting differently than the engine does they give you the tools and API to build your own

but that is alot of work and does require alot of knowhow with shaders/scripting that I know not everyone has or has the time to do

[raven flower]

hmm, okay. So custom lighting is currently behind a knowledge-wall?
Having easy access to lighting manipulation is still quite strange to do yeah?
I'm still quite confused about why though. I feel like there's a big chunk of projects that could gain a lot from not using physically accurate lighting, but are unable to do so because they're just starting out.
I feel like it would be in Unity's interest to expose these parameters to the users in an intuitive way.

having the roadmap be completely void of any lighting options also makes me feel like I'm insane, and no one really wants this. I'd be surprised if that was actually the case though.

[tired inlet]

Ambient occlusion has it's place in the post processing stack. There is a reason literally every AAA game targeting reasonably realistic looking graphics out it has it, right? There are different implementations of it thought. SSAO as Unity has it, is the lowest form of it but also the most performant. RTAO is the most superior, but screw people that don't have a gpu for that, right? HBAO is inbetween and the nicest middleground for it. I don't agree that SSAO adds on top of your bake. When you bake lightmaps in Unity you can literally choose to not bake ambient occlusion to in your lightmaps (it's a checkbox and disabled by default) to avoid overshadowing.

Then next up the fact that some people over use it doesn't mean it is inherently bad, those people just need the proper guidance 🙂

In game with either realtime or mixed baked lighting it makes sense to connect dynamic objects to it's environment by having some type of AO integration.

That github link you shared looks neat though, and I'll look at it some more but I don't think it applies to the conversation we're having. Since that overhauls the whole shadowing part of the system instead of the AO we're talking about.

Now let me get some receipts, because it wouldn't be fun without it, right? I'm working on a scene right now for the game I'm working on that targets realistic graphics. In this scene you are looking at 99% baked lighting where the directional light only hits the floor by the windows.

See the obvious difference between (in my opinion properly tweaked) AO, and no AO under the couch, or tv console. It adds depth to the scene, and with the limitations of the lighting engine in unity as a whole it does a great job of adding more richness to the lighting.

If your target system can handle HDRP, they have a decent soft shadow implementation there too

[night shell]

this pretty much covers what I mentioned though lol, use it correctly and it can definetly supplement your lighting well. The underying GI term you have is fairly low frequency as I can tell by the lack of shadowing under the couch and TV cabinet. So you'd use AO to provide the SMALLER scale occlusion that feeds into the whole GI term.... BUT if you had high quality lightmaps to begin with (or let alone a high precision GI term) there would be no need to have an AO term because those small edge cases will be taken care of

no AO here, just dense lightmaps (although they look a little funk here because I compressed them with crunch compresison)

[tired inlet]

Right, but you didn't read the part where I said baking AO into your lightmaps is optional so you don't double shadow, and keep the benefit of having your dynamic objects connect to the scene

[night shell]

there are alot of edge cases and scenarios granted where this kind of style of lighting and baking wouldn't be applicable

[night shell]

oh I know, I suppose I need to rephrase more what I meant, its more of a rag on SSAO rather than AO in general

so I'll reel back and point bad finger at SSAO

[tired inlet]

Saying AO only applies to edge cases is just not correct if you look at all of the current AAA games that target realistic lighting

They all have it 😛

But we don't have to agree, and your screenshot looks nice for sure

[night shell]

when full pathtracing becomes the norm this won't be a thing lol

[tired inlet]

By that time we're probably all replaced by AI anyway 😛

But I've been an environment and lighting artist for 14 years now in Unity. The pain and struggle back in the unity 2.5 days was real haha

All the nice things were talking about now is stuff I would have wished for back then

[night shell]

and its true alot of AAA games do have it, but that doesn't mean it's accurate or correct is what I'm trying to argue basically. Most do, but some don't (Far Cry 3 comes to mind, and even forspoken) I'm talking like nerdy technical nitpicky peddantic details here lmao

like stupidly specific

[tired inlet]

Bro nothing is accurate or correct until we get realtime full path tracing

[night shell]

you are right, but we can hack ways of getting close to accuracy and have lol

[tired inlet]

It's all smoke and mirrors

[night shell]

oh damn I was a unity 3.0 dude, you were around longer than I was

[tired inlet]

Apparently by not having AO in your game and having your dynamic shit float over the floor then 😉

Haha

I'll do me, you do you ❤️

That was fun though

[night shell]

admittedly there are tons of general details and such I glossed over

thats what is difficult tbh talking about it because there are so many cases

no accident that carmack says rendering is harder than rocket science lmao, because it all stems from a foundation of hacks ontop of cheats

[tired inlet]

I'm just waiting for a world where we no longer need screen space anything

[night shell]

being in a VR context I've been avoding screen space stuff for a long while anyway

[tired inlet]

But it's going to take a while before the minimum requirements you are supposed to hit have the hardware to take that 😛

[night shell]

because screen space stuff just looks bad

[tired inlet]

Agreed

[night shell]

hence why no SSAO and something like this

[tired inlet]

Though that's true of a lot of the smoke and mirror ways we do rendering and vfx for games

[night shell]

doesn't fall apart when the source is no longer visible

[tired inlet]

as soon as you can see it in stereoscopic 3d you see you are just looking at a flat texture of a flame being propelled by a particle 😛

[night shell]

I'm just waiting to see volumetric effects start taking the stage more

they are mighty great in VR

[tired inlet]

Yeah this looks great, I'm just skeptical of whether it'll run more performant than SSAO haha

[night shell]

its all baked

even volumetrics

[tired inlet]

Yeah volumetrics rock, especially with APV's now

[night shell]

APVs feed into volumetrics?

I haven't messed with alot of the new unity tech lately

been stuck on BIRP

[tired inlet]

They do!

[night shell]

huh

well I wonder how performant because with mine I've been able to get them to run on a quest 2 standalone

[tired inlet]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7pgzxxKc0g

This guy has dialed everything up to overkill haha, but as you can see APV enhances your volumetrics now 🙂

[night shell]

oh thats a little different than mine

yeah the ideal system is the classic volumetric fog with realtime shadowmaps and then supplement with APV

but mine is completely baked all the way through

[tired inlet]

Yeah you could do all baked with APV

But if it ain't broke don't fix it

Your implementation looks good and if you're stuck on birp, then it's not gonna help you anyway

[night shell]

https://github.com/frostbone25/Unity-Baked-Volumetrics

[night shell]

sorry got sidetracked but some of these parameters are already exposed. But again like I mentioned the reason why I geuss it's not modularized so to speak (I believe there is some progress with later unity versions in that regard on this) is because lighting and rendering as a whole is not quite that simple. It's not like you have a computer and you can swap out the gpu for another gpu and your set, there is alot of interconnectivity that happens. In a forward renderer it can get pretty complex. Using a deferred renderer does make some of the steps easier but it's still a process that ultimately depends on the artistic decisions of a project

Expose too much also on a renderer and you can create a lot of overhead and potential performance degradation having to build a system that can take in any kind of input that depends on the style you want to go for.

edit: changed analogy since I'm not a car guy

but the best that unity can do and have done so far is the SRP stuff like I mentioned, give you the tools to build what you want and how you want. It's technical and not artist friendly by any stretch but atleast you build something that is tuned to what you want. Unity or any engine for that matter can only build you something that is general enough to where you could do quite a lot with it, but for scenarios where there is heavy stylization or customization needed you can only account for so much

[deft fiber]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@17.0/manual/Shader-Graph-Sample-Production-Ready.html
There is a shader graph custom lighting shader now

[raven flower]

Roger dodger. Will check out.

[lofty igloo]

@tired inlet @night shell Nothing to add, but enjoying the conersation and images you two are postingt

[raven flower]

There is indeed a graph for the Lit shader, I don't think you can change the lighting at all in it though. I can't see any lighting data. The links to the documentation for it is also dead for some reason...

[civic tendon]

when i paint the terrain with this grass texture, it appears EXTREMELY dark compared to other materials, what can i do??

but when i remove it, its normal

[copper nacelle]

In the first picture lighting looks illuminated.
but when i go far lighting acts weird.

[deft fiber]

My mistake, the one I linked has the shader graph template for Lit shader and its properties, but no custom lighting
The one I should've pointed you to is in the Shader Graph Feature Examples sample

I tend to confuse the two myself

Should look like this

[floral swallow]

Looks like I'll be needing this. My little handheld light looks great but the shadows are vile haha

[spare pulsar]

Can anybody test creating point light in a vr template to see if isn't just me that that it doesn't project light, pls

[pure estuary]

messing around with 2d

whats happening here

and

is there a way to stop it

i could make it self shadow but then the whole things dark

[floral swallow]

I have lights in this room which should be entirely blocked off by this wall, yet they shine through. Am I missing a setting or something along that line? Shadows are enabled and set to soft though hard doesn't help. I'm kind of at a loss

[deft fiber]

You have no shadow casting, for one reason or another

maybe too many realtime shadow lights, or too close so shadowmask can't be calculated

[floral swallow]

Apparently, low strength leads to bleeding through walls 🙃
Got it fixed pretty nicely.

[deft fiber]

That'll do it
half strength logically means the light can be only half-occluded

[ebon hare]

how do i get more defined rays of light

i wanna fucking smell the lights

this is a video from #1180330435151147028

i want lights to be this strong

[agile lynx]

Hey guys, I am trying to get a lighting like this unity but the results aren't that good, can you please help me out?

this is how it looks for now

[agile lynx]

for lights should I use volume lighting or directional?

@timber lichen

this is how it looks rn

[agile lynx]

So with range and intensity, what should be the values around, maybe the range to the ground but I need help with intensity etc. Even though I did everything you mentioned above it doesn't look like that please enlighten me.

I've tried hard shadows, but I still don't get that shadowy look.

How can I improve that?

[agile lynx]

This one provided

Should I add a directional light outside of the map like on top?

[agile lynx]

URP

I am currently baking for directional lighting give me a few mins

@timber lichen this is what happened

i think 50 intensity was too high

let me play a bit

[upper crystal]

In Unity's scripting API I found LightProbes.CalculateInterpolatedLightAndOcclusionProbes
Does Unity 6 now have occlusion probes? I couldn't find anything besides that API

[agile lynx]

@timber lichen when you see this, this is the latest version

[radiant harness]

Good day, I’m having an issue with shadows in my project. In the Game tab, I can see that real-time shadows are rendering correctly. However, when I build an APK and test it, the shadows don’t render. Does anyone know the solution and could kindly help me? I’m using version 2022.3.5f1.

[quaint river]

I need a bit of help please

In unity I am doing the following:

Using modular pieces
Using a texture atlas for materials
Res no bigger than 256x256

I get this horrible black seam whre the modular peices join

[deft fiber]

With baked lightmaps?

[quaint river]

Well I am assuming this is the issue because before baking it's not a huge issue at al l

afte baking I see these horrible black lines

I tried adjusting the UV shells assuming those where the issue

[deft fiber]

What types of lighting are you baking

[quaint river]

Area lights

only

[deft fiber]

I mean lighting settings

[quaint river]

ohh Well I ahve tried a few but this is the latest settings for the ps1 style :

[deft fiber]

Since you're baking lightmaps, there are not any very effective solutions besides not using modular geometry, instead combining the floors into continuous faces
https://discussions.unity.com/t/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide/895352/
chapter 10

[quaint river]

That is not an option XD

everything is is modular

walls, doors , windows , floors

[deft fiber]

Baked lightmaps are static, so there doesn't seem to be a benefit to keeping the level parts modular after the levels are designed

And when using lightmaps, you should get rid of the internal and hidden faces since they're a big waste of lightmap space

And alternative is to light those parts by probes instead
With urp/hdrp you'd use the APVs, and with birp you'd use the light probe proxy volume
Those will change the appearance of the lighting though

[quaint river]

That is a little higher than my understand level 😅

[mossy mica]

Hey can anyone help me figure out why the skybox is not showing?

[quaint river]

How do others manage to bake using modular assets?

[deft fiber]

They usually do not
At least not with lightmaps
To get good results with them you'll need to avoid discontinuous geometry, UV seams and occluded polygons