archived-lighting

[silk ledge]

Thank you!!

how can I make sure the light probe is only affecting the model

and not the rest of the scene?

Oh that questions doesn't make any sense! I finally get it thank you!!

any idea why shadows aren't appearing in the scene? Looks very flatly lit after baking

[fallen fulcrum]

did you enabled lightning in the scene?

[silk ledge]

yeah I have lights in the scene

[fallen fulcrum]

thats not what i meant

[silk ledge]

sorry what do you mean? Pretty new to this haha

[fallen fulcrum]

there is a small bulb icon in the scene view

click on it

[silk ledge]

yeah its enabled

[fallen fulcrum]

does your renderers have all "cast shadow" enabled?

[silk ledge]

oh let me check

is that in project settings?

[fallen fulcrum]

no its in the individual renderers but it should be enabled by default

[silk ledge]

I mean in realtime shadows are casting just not baked

[fallen fulcrum]

whats your current quality setting

[silk ledge]

is that in lighting settings?

[fallen fulcrum]

no in project settings

[fallen fulcrum]

is that the selected quality?

[silk ledge]

Yes

[fallen fulcrum]

hmm i'm out of ideas

[silk ledge]

also I'm wrong in real time sitll no shadows cast

could the light be too bright?

[fallen fulcrum]

it could

but i'm not sure thats the issue

does it look like this when you play?

[silk ledge]

let me export and check

yeah it does

[fallen fulcrum]

well check if the light is too bright, and i'm out of ideas 🤷

[silk ledge]

all good hha thanks!

Tried a lot still can't get shadows weridly enough :/

[silk ledge]

lights weren't set to cast shadows 🤦‍♂️

thanks for the help!

[silk ledge]

why dos some assets look worse when baked?

any idea why I can't go into the model import settings and generate the uvs on some assets?

[silk ledge]

Also why does the desk in realtime lighting (1) look so much better than the desk in baked lighting (2) which looks generally grimier to me

[limber delta]

What are you bake settings?

[robust karma]

Anyone know what this is and how I can reduce it?

[silk ledge]

These are my bake settings

[limber delta]

Alright. Your indirect samples seems to be incredibly high. I'd try lowering them, maybe 256 for a start.

Perhaps try 64 direct and 80 on lightmap resolution. The Lightmap resolution I suspect will make a lot of difference.

Try baking with GPU if possible, should be quicker.

Also check this video for explanations of the different settings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnetI4-dNY&list=PL_fUBw8N69mBtgz2Lw9l0qcg3bGOi5Oah&index=3

[silk ledge]

Thank you! WIll report back!

also any idea why on some of my modfesl I don't have the option

to go to the model import settings and generate the uv?

[silk ledge]

before after the change. 256 for samples and 64 for direct and 80 on resolution

definitely an improvement!

shadows on the wall in general look pretty gross though. any idea why?

[limber delta]

Should be under "Model" in the mesh import settings.

[limber delta]

Yes, nice! I'd continue experimenting with those settings. Perhaps start low, then try to adjust one at a time and see what difference (if any) it makes. Also watch the video I posted 😉

[limber delta]

Are you referring to the banding effect? Not sure what's causing that. You could try a higher lightmap resolution and see what that does.

If you are refering to the shadows not being sharp enough, look into "Shadows > Max Distance". Project Settings > Graphics > Click on the PipelineAsset file > in the inspector > you'll fins the setting under Shadows. You could try lowering the max distance.

[silk ledge]

Thanks! I'll try that! Any idea what the optiont to go to the model import settings isn't avalible on some game objects?

[limber delta]

Sorry, don't know what's happening there. Anything to do with how you export? I always export .fbx from Blender.

[silk ledge]

also getting these weird colors on some objects

on the wall and desk

and that's a good idea I'llt ry that

hmm it is an fbx file..

[unborn minnow]

I have a moving light for my day night cycle and it keeps saying global illumination preprocessing and causing a lot of lag. Will this happen in the build too or can I disable something to stop it from happening. I already turned off auto generate lighting

[silk ledge]

watched the video super helpful! I guess I still am having trouble understanding why the desk looks so much less, idk grimier in the realtime lightning (also a directional in realtime vs point in baked)

[limber delta]

Yeah, I think someone else will have to try to help you. Don't know why that is.

[silk ledge]

I wasn't able to uv unwrap the desk, that may have somethign to diwth it?

also these pictures illustrated it clearer

(1) is baked 2 is realtime

maybe it's the model?

[silk ledge]

and no biggie I appreciate the help! already learned a lot more! Thanks!

but ya I'm thinking maybe the lightmap on the model is messed up sinceI didn't have the option to generate it.

thats all I can think of

[limber delta]

Yes, I think so.

[silk ledge]

weird that he wall was discolored too.

nvm actually I know what caused that

ya I'll post again at some poitn if I feel like rivisitng the scene. Thanks again!

[grizzled warren]

Hi all,

I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that baked lighting doesn't work in Unity-- from any angle. I can replace the lightmappers and buy third parts probe placers. Then I replace all my material shaders, and then still get hit with this..

I guess I have a pretty dumb question here: but do baked lights in Unity work? Did I just waste months trailblazing technology that no one is using?

https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/light-probes-lose-their-lighting-data-after-entering-play-mode-when-baked-and-realtime-gi-are-enabled

I'm looking into realtime GI ray tracing solutions, but they don't seem to work well with low end hardware

[chilly kettle]

baked lighting is used everywhere and works very good

[grizzled warren]

do you know of a game using light probes in Unity? I could use inspiration

it's looking completely broken to me

My levels have all been designed around baked lights.. so I can't really even scratch it all and implement a realtime light culling solution

[chilly kettle]

depends what you think lightprobes can do ^^

[grizzled warren]

keep their data

which... they can't

[chilly kettle]

They save the lighting they receive when light is baked.
And give their light to movable objects that come close to the probes

[grizzled warren]

I know Kj, I'm just venting I guess. The IssueTracker says it all-- they don't work. I don't know what to do, feeling extremely defeated.

[chilly kettle]

Did you try Unity 2022.2 like they wrote there (Fix Version 2022.2)

[grizzled warren]

I see that.. I'm wondering, Unity's betas are so bad, though....

this is so stressful, I have to read the IssueTracker and crash logs every day

[limber delta]

You should check the video I posted above 🙂

[limber delta]

This one

I used Bakery for a while during our last project, but it gave me a lot of issues so for our current project I haven't used any plugins for baking and everything works fine now.

[chilly kettle]

Bakery is perfect ^^ But wont solve the problem of him i think

[grizzled warren]

yeah, I'm using the Bakery

I think 2022.2 is my only hope, if I don't try switching approaches (deferred lights or ray tracing GI)

None of my assets have tested there yet, though..

thank you Kj, I'll give it a try I guess

[chilly kettle]

thats all i can say ^^

[grizzled warren]

2022.2 is still beta alpha

[chilly kettle]

i never had your issue. When i bake lighting the probes work well

in 2020 and 2021

[grizzled warren]

I don't think Unity's beta alpha is stable, is it?

apparently, on build, there's a small chance your light probe data will be cleared out

[silk ledge]

Hey! Any idea why when I switch color space from gamma to linear the reflections on my windows go away?

(1) is gamma (2) is linear. In Gamma the reflection probes dont' appear to have any affect

*effect

[hushed flicker]

How do i avoid Sky light passing inside my buildings? 🙂 I've tried with volumes but the volumes affect the sky color

[still copper]

Could try adjusting the shadow bias

[hushed flicker]

The directional light isnt affecting it, only the HDRP sky, making grayish color inside building

[vestal compass]

Guys this is my first time trying to bake lights in Unity and the baking worked fine but it turned all of my materials into black and white. What I mean is the color in material preview and the actual color is miles apart

Please Help

[silk ledge]

Oooh I’ll keep this In mind! Good to know! Thanks!

[crimson stirrup]

hey guys, does anyone know why a light would be appearing here?

i've removed the skybox with the settings you can see on the right, there aren't any lights in the scene...

there was a directional light at the top of the scene 😭

adhd is amazing

i quadruple checked it

[hushed flicker]

How do I stop HDRI sky from lighting up closed spaces? A cube without lights get som gray lights from the sky through walls

[upper fable]

Skybox is used for reflections by default

Use reflection probes for more accurate reflections

[hushed flicker]

Thanks! I didnt thought of that, have messing around with this couple of hours, but i saw my reflection cube area was to small...

[vestal compass]

Can someone help please 🙏

[woeful otter]

Is there a way to bake light in prefabs?

Or is there a better workflow

[terse breach]

What object is the 'player_mat' assigned to in your scene?

[vestal compass]

The capsule but as you can see it doesn't look green in any angle

[terse breach]

Oh, that's because no light source is being applied to the capsule, since baking would store all your light info into a separate texture. Did you mark the capsule as static?

[near bison]

Does crunch compression not work with reflection probes? I have one for a mirror which is 8mb but while enabling crunch processes it for a while, it doesn't actually change in size at all, at least according to the preview window. It says it's using BC6H format.

I've noticed I can't seem to compress my lightmaps either. Same issue. Except these take up 16mb each.

[heavy peak]

anybody know how to fix this lighting issue?

its been this way before i baked it

and then i baked it

and its the same issue

[vestal compass]

I didn't

[marsh shale]

Can anyone help me out with this? I have no idea why some are entirely lit by seemingly nothing while others are completely dark

issue comes primarily from my baked global illumination as it looks fine without it

[vestal compass]

thanks so much. As soon as I marked the capsule as static it worked!!!!

[thorny tusk]

guys please help i have a problem i have a 3d black box but somehow theres still light inside how? do i fix

[near bison]

Show your light settings on each one. You probably have them set to probes rather than lightmaps. Probes are only as good as your probe placement, so you get a lot of weird results.

[thorny tusk]

please help me thats the only thing i need to launch my game

[near bison]

Nobody can help you with so little information. Post screenshots of how the lighting is set up on it, etc.

[thorny tusk]

how?

[near bison]

How what? How do you capture a screenshot?

Win Shift S

[near bison]

Well first of all, you appear to have a plane, not a box.

[thorny tusk]

yea

ii made a box with planes

[near bison]

Okay well that's unusual but without knowing if you are using baked lighting or not, all I can tell you is you both have "cast shadows" set to off, and you don't have contribute global illumination checked, so the objects will not be included in lightmap calculations, nor lightmapped. So any lightmapped objects inside won't be shadowed by it... Unless you're in distance shadowmask mode in which case they could be. It's complcated. Do you want your planes to be lightmapped?

[thorny tusk]

im new i barely understood anything

but i want it a box to have no light at all

plus my map is lightened by the sun

[near bison]

So you're not using baked lighting I assume. Cause if you were that's a little more advanced.

[thorny tusk]

yea

[near bison]

In that case just set Cast Shadows to On.

[thorny tusk]

where do i find cast shadows?

[near bison]

It's right there in your screenshot.

[thorny tusk]

oh

but theres still light?

[near bison]

Okay...

[thorny tusk]

i turned them all on

[near bison]

No, keep it on.

[thorny tusk]

my bad i mean on

[near bison]

To to the window menu.

Rendering

Lighting

[thorny tusk]

?

[thorny tusk]

ok i just opened it

now what

[near bison]

Click on the environment tab.

[thorny tusk]

alright

i did

[near bison]

Environment lighting source, set that to color... Then make the color black and you will have no ambient lighting.

Then the inside of the box will be completely black but you may find that's not what you want for the rest of your scene. That's basically disabling ambient light. Which is useful when using baked lighting.

[thorny tusk]

theres still light..

[near bison]

Post a screenshot of what you're seeing.

And the settings on your light source.

[near bison]

You didn't even change the source to color like I said to.

And you still have cast shadows off on your plane.

[thorny tusk]

ohhh

[thorny tusk]

i was just testing

[thorny tusk]

how ? i have it the same colors?

[near bison]

Have what the same colors?

[near bison]

Cropping your screenshots so much is detrimental to me helping you. I have no idea what color selector box that is.

So I don't know if it's the right one.

That...

Should be set to this:

[thorny tusk]

where is that?

[near bison]

You really need to read my instructions more carefully. "Environment lighting source, set that to color... Then make the color black and you will have no ambient lighting."

It's right below the realtime shadow color you changed instead.

[thorny tusk]

oh godddd

everything is black

[near bison]

Well, yes you now have no amblient light.

Here's why everything is black...

[thorny tusk]

how do i do that?

amblient light.

[near bison]

How do you do what?

You just turned it off.

By setting to black.

Listen...

[thorny tusk]

oh then how do i make light

in other places

[near bison]

Ambient light is a global thing that gets added to all light everywhere.

So... With ambient light, you can never have an area completely in shadow.

But that's what you want.

In your box.

[thorny tusk]

yea

[near bison]

Sooo....

[thorny tusk]

i got what i want in my box

but not the rest of my map is black

how do i create light?

[near bison]

You add more lights that have shadow casting enabled.

[thorny tusk]

u mean cast shadows?

[near bison]

I don't understand the question.

[thorny tusk]

here look

i added a light

but still black

[near bison]

That's an area light,

It's a special kind of light for casting light from rectangles I believe.

I don't think it can cast shadows and I think that says baked after it but your inspector is so small I can't read all the text in it.

[thorny tusk]

so what light do i use to create a light like real life

[near bison]

Heh, boy is that a loaded question. 😄

[thorny tusk]

?

what is a loaded question

[near bison]

The one you just asked.

[thorny tusk]

i barely speak english

[near bison]

Oh... 🙂

[thorny tusk]

idk what loaded means

so do i make a direction light

or a point light or a spot light

[near bison]

A loaded question means... Well, it's a COMPLICATED question. You opened a can of worms. Pandora's box. The ark of the covenant. 😄

[thorny tusk]

oh

ok s how do i light up a area

is that better?

[near bison]

Well give me a sec and I'll explain why your question is complicated.

Light in games is all smoke and mirrors... a trick. We use lots of different tricks combined to fool people into thinking the lighting is correct. But it's not.

The closest thing you can get to real life lighting is to use BAKED lighting. Baked lighting bounces light around the scene, so areas that are hidden from the light source are dark. But baked lighting is lighting that is not dynamic. It won't change with moving objects or moving light sources. Shadows too will be static. So, we have ways to combine baked lighting with real time shadows that are not totally accurate but look good. That's called shadowmasking. When you set a light to Mixed mode instead of Real Time or Baked, it is both baked AND real time, and casts real time shadows onto a baked environment. Distance Shadowmasking is a more advanced mode which is also less performant where all non-moving objects with baked lighting can also cast real time shadows onto moving objects.

Sooo... You have two choices. Learn how to bake light in your scenes... Or add a few strategically placed directional light sources in the scene with shadow casting enabled which is gonna increase your rendered polycount a lot, but for a simple game it might be fine.

The latter solution probably isn't gonna look great, and depending on your scene might not even be a workable or good solution.

[thorny tusk]

oh god

uhhh

[near bison]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnG2gOKV9dw&t=278s

[thorny tusk]

oh alright thank you

[near bison]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E0JXOZDTKA

[thorny tusk]

il fighure it out myself

[near bison]

Watch those.

[thorny tusk]

thanks for vids

[near bison]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhELeLnynI8

[orchid solar]

How do I make realtime spotlight more smooth? In the photo, you can see layers from the spotlight, I want to smooth out the layers

[hardy ridge]

May I ask why this happens? I am using HDRP but it seems like these two wall objects are being lit very differently, even though they are two copies of the same object (literally cntrl c + cntrl v).

[near bison]

It doesn't look like you're using baked lighting, but if you are using light probes then the two objects may be picking up different light probes if you don't have them set to global illumination lightmapped. In that case, you could either set them to be lightmapped and bake the lighting, or you could set one to be the reference probe for the other. There's a slot for you to drop an object in the lighting settings on the object.

What this will do is it will make one object use the other object's transform as the point from which it samples light probes. You could also just make an empty object and then set both of them to reference it, and then you can move that empty object around to get it in a position where the lighting looks good.

[hardy ridge]

That makes sense! Thank you so much!

[deft fiber]

The "layers" you mean are color banding, I suppose, due to the fact that monitors can display a limited number of colors
There's a feature by the name of dithering which jumbles the colors in the bands so the bands disappear

Might not work on all build targets though, such as webgl

[eternal pasture]

After several hours of light baking, the process stuck on 99%. I tried to change the settings and reduce the resolution but the result is the same. Is there some way to hard stop light baking and keep the current result? Because the scene looks good, but as soon as I stop baking, all changes are reset.

I use Unity 2020.3.18f1 - I need to use this specific version for AltspaceVR.

[wintry ether]

why before baking light is better than after bake?

[mild jungle]

when i open prefab and return to scene it becomes very dark any idea how to fix this?

[acoustic niche]

Hi, devs! Do you know why light (Directional Light) is entering my scene (interior) if everything is perfectly snapped?

Thanks in advance

[upper fable]

If the mesh is flat shaded, edges will split when rendering the shadow map which can lead into gaps in the shadows, smooth shaded meshes doesnt suffer with that. Making the shadow casting double sided can potentially fix those gaps but its not guaranteed. I think only way to guarantee no gaps is to use smooth shaded mesh for shadow casting or use 0 as a normal bias which you shouldnt do to avoid ”shadow acne”

[deft fiber]

You must "generate" lighting for each scene from Lighting window

[acoustic niche]

Double facing on Cast Shadows option don’t solve this problem… What do you refer about smooth shaded mesh on shadow casting?

[main wolf]

because out of the box (using standard shader) baked lighting wont have specular nor reflection. You'll have to add them manually using custom shader

[upper fable]

Oh, so by snapping you mean every wall is different game object right? Did you enable double sided for all of those?

[quartz zinc]

Hello i am currently having a problem with my lighting where it is just pixelated for some reason
Can someone please help😅

[upper fable]

No clue what might be the issue. Show screenshot of what you mean

[acoustic niche]

Yes, every wall is different and they are snapped on the vertices of the edges. And yes: all of them have Two Sided activated

[acoustic niche]

Adjusting Normal Bias on URP settings does not solve that at all, because it also appears new light lines...

[deft fiber]

The perfect snapping is kind of the problem
They'd have to overlap or be geometrically fully merged
Giving the walls thickness usually helps

[acoustic niche]

I'm going to try and see if that works! I hope so 🤞

Thank you so much, @deft fiber

[ripe current]

so just wondering, i just created a new project before, added urp and i am trying to bake light on a simple scene but with the progressive GPU lightmapper its using 100% of my CPU and none of my GPU.
Just wondering if there is a fix for this because it would decrease the baking time massively

[deft fiber]

If the GPU can't be used for progressive GPU lightmapping, the console normally will have a message why it fell back to CPU
Some vague reasons that happened I usually could fix just by restarting the editor

[ripe current]

I never get a message in the console and it always stays on progressive gpu. Restarting the editor has done nothing for me either

[acoustic niche]

Hi again, @deft fiber and @upper fable! The problem still appears after testing, even, with very thick meshes inserting one into another... This is freaking us out!

[acoustic niche]

On the exterior (where Directional Light comes from) also happen weird things...

May be wrong some option on .FBX importer?

[fleet tiger]

has anybody ever had this issue? I've baked this scene multiple time and it looked fine until now, but now whenever I bake it, some objects always have their shadows renderered properly while others are 100% covered in shadow when far from the camera. The baked shadowmasks look pretty much fine so I have no idea what the cause could be

[acoustic niche]

Have you checked Shadow Distance options on your render’s pipeline settings?

[fleet tiger]

Well, the distance is like 25m, which is seemingly the distance at which the baked shadows are supposed to replace the real time ones
For some reason this is only working on a few specific objects

basically :
Shadows below 25m are fine on all assets
Shadows above 25m are either completely black (not counting ambient light) or proper baked shadows on seemingly random assets

[fleet tiger]

ended up fixing it by reverting a ton of changes to the import settings on all the assets in the scene
those changes were to their lightmap uvs, but considering they looked mostly the same before and after the changes go figure what the actual problem was

[acoustic niche]

At least you managed to fix that! One problem less 👌🏻

[hybrid rivet]

An issue regarding lighting.

I have to turn lighting up to 4000000 lumen for it to actually show up in my scene- I don't understand why. When I open it in prefab menu it's extremely bright but when it's actually put into the scene it's like normal.

How it looks in the prefab menu.

vs how it looks in the actual game.

I'd like the lighting to not be set so high for it to actually show up but idk how.

[main wolf]

Is it baked light? if it is then try adding bigger padding to the lightmap

[acoustic niche]

It is baked light! I’ll try that

[acoustic niche]

It does not work, @main wolf...

[chilly kettle]

Do you have a shadow caster on the outside of your building there?

[chilly kettle]

Maybe "texel invalidity" from exposed backfaces

[acoustic niche]

I don't exactly know what you mean... 🥲

[chilly kettle]

Its happening often, that edges look like yours.
You can avoid this by adding geometry on the ousides, that blocks the light from hitting your walls from the outside

[acoustic niche]

Yes, but there are more problems in the scene...

[chilly kettle]

normally, you solve problems, step by step 😄

[acoustic niche]

Light is working so weird: entering edges, not respecting zones that are inside...

[acoustic niche]

Yes, that's true

Totally crazy...

[chilly kettle]

yeah, thats light bleeding from the corner into the inner

[acoustic niche]

This meshes are snapped properly, double sided... and nothing works!

[chilly kettle]

yeah, as i said, its not working this way most of the time.

[acoustic niche]

And what about that beams along the scene?

Could it be due to my Unity version (2021.3.2f1)?

[chilly kettle]

No, as i said you need additional geometry on the outside

did you model that house yourself?

[acoustic niche]

An artist of my team did. The house is made by planes snapped all together.

I can show you the entire scene on a Discord call if you want...

[chilly kettle]

You need additional geometry with the normals facing outside

that can avoid all the light leaking in the edges

[acoustic niche]

So... converting these planes into boxes with normals facing outside and snapping all together again, @chilly kettle?

Is that what you mean?

[chilly kettle]

wait, i show you on a 3d model 😄

[acoustic niche]

This interior is going to be illuminated by some windows on the scene, but the rest need to be like this: no light entering edges, roof and more

[acoustic niche]

Oh, thanks! You're the best

[chilly kettle]

Left side is yours.
Right side is the the same, but with geometry on the outside, that will block the light.

[acoustic niche]

Yes, now I know what you mean... And do you think maintaining planes instead of switch to boxes would be more appropriate? (I'm just thinking on trying how to solve more eventual issues)

After doing what you recommended us, @chilly kettle, this is the result!

It is still presenting weird issues...

And I think this solution may not be what we need because we have to add some windows to the walls...

[chilly kettle]

show me your model ^^

[deft fiber]

Refer to real world light values when using physical light units, and always view them using some kind of exposure settings

[hybrid rivet]

but even with an exposure volume- I still can't see any of the lighting unless I like turn the lumen value up to 4 million

[deft fiber]

What's the exposure set to?

You should have the sample scene to reference sane exposure and lighting values from

[hybrid rivet]

it's on 0 rn.

[upper fable]

Are you using some extremely high bias values?

[hybrid rivet]

yes, even when I make a new sceen and place the prefab in, it's still very dark.

what can I edit that'll affect how much light I'm seeing here

[deft fiber]

Exposure

Please use the sample scene for comparison

[hybrid rivet]

Would I edit the exposure in a volume or somewhere else? because when I edit the exposure in a global volume it doesn't seem to change anything.

[deft fiber]

Yes
It should have an effect

[hybrid rivet]

which mode do you think would work for this?

[deft fiber]

Do you have the sample scene?

[hybrid rivet]

yes

[deft fiber]

So use that as a reference as a base to build from

[hybrid rivet]

this is the sample scene here. It's still very dark.

[deft fiber]

That doesn't look like the sample scene

[hybrid rivet]

hm...

Guess I need to import it again. I'm assuming it would be in package manager.

[deft fiber]

I mean this place

[hybrid rivet]

I have never seen that in my life.

The sample scene they usually gave us was a chunk with some ply wood.

Is it on the asset store?

[deft fiber]

You are using HDRP, right?

[hybrid rivet]

Yes.

[deft fiber]

You get this scene as a project template when creating a new project

[hybrid rivet]

I did not create this project. I'll have to ask my coding partner about that.

Thank you for the tip.

[deft fiber]

HDRP is quite complex and expects you to understand physical light values and exposure, won't really hold your hand at all
Using a template is extremely helpful because then you don't have to know how to set up

all this

[hybrid rivet]

Yes, I've been messing around with those for a few months now. It's very difficult to perfect without any sort of reference.

[deft fiber]

Another option is to make a new project yourself and copy values from there

[hybrid rivet]

That would work too. I'll try that, thank you.

[main tartan]

Hi! Do you know why my lighting is supposed to look like that but when i load a new scene with LoadAsync it just look terrible?

[fleet tiger]

Does your 2nd scene also have a light source?

[main tartan]

yes

[deft fiber]

When switching scenes at runtime, each one needs to have lighting generated from the lighting window

[acoustic niche]

We have changed model and light artifacts seem to be working fine. Our new problem, I guess, is on materials: Unlit shows transparent. May be a problem with .fbx?

[main tartan]

oohhh i see thanks!

[deft fiber]

The reason it doesn't happen in the editor it I think is because the editor generates temporary lighting for each scene when opened, even when auto-generate is off
Not sure why it isn't communicated better

[main tartan]

I see thanks! it's working now and thanks for the explaination

[worn tapir]

Hey, do any of you know an asset store item that adds volumetric lighting (preferably with shadows) to URP and supports camera stacking and VR?
price can be up to 200$.

[mental lagoon]

Fog: BOXOPHOBIC
Light shafts & cloud shadows: Staggart Creations

[mental lagoon]

volumetric lighting w/ shadows -- not sure, but you can see my above screenshot if that's a look you are ok with (screen space FX)

[static granite]

In the urp, is it possible to make it so lighting is received from one angle, but all shadows are cast straight down? I'm making a 3d platformer, and it would be a great way to make the lighting more dynamic without sacrificing depth perception.

[deft fiber]

It'd be quite complex to "decouple" light from shadow, but usually "blob shadows" are used to mark the character's position when jumping
URP quite recently got support for that feature

[brazen oak]

I have a game which loads in multiple scenes at once. How do I use the skybox of a particular scene, instead of just using the skybox of the first scene to load?

[hidden void]

hey guys I am tryuin to crete a reflection probe, it doe not create an reflective object

ah ok I have to activate gizmos

[static granite]

Oh nice! What's the best way to go about adding blob shadows in urp?

[deft fiber]

URP package officially has an importable sample demonstrating it I think

[static granite]

Nice

[upper fable]

Using custom (handwritten) shader you can get much more control over the lighting and shadows

[keen elbow]

im having some trouble getting unity to bake lighting

it just gets stuck at 82% complete on baking

but im not seeing any changes in the scene

[silk ledge]

Before and after^
any idea why after updating from unity 2019 to 2020 , the lightbake on this model made it grey?

[silk ledge]

?

[bleak merlin]

In the game view sometimes shadows appear/dissapear out of nowhere. Any settings to fix that?

[silk ledge]

any idea why the new unity version messed up the drawer model?

[little condor]

If you're referring to a Directional light then there is a Max Distance setting. If you're using HDRP this can be changed if you add a Shadow override to your Sky and Fog volume.

[deft fiber]

You're going to have to be more specific
What type of lights, where, and disappear how exactly?

[little condor]

It's difficult to tell just from the picture. Maybe part of the shadow map is bleeding into the UVs of that part of the model?

[fleet tiger]

hey, I was working on my laptop and set up a bunch of light probes in a scene, which worked fine
however, I opened the project on my other PC, and not only are those light probes not visible or selectable, I can't see any others I'm adding, to any scene
any idea what the cause could be?

nevermind, restarted unity and for some reason they're there now

[wicked lagoon]

Is there a way to have good open outdoor lighting without ambient light. Because I need some areas to be darker interiors and it looks strange with a lot of light coming from nowhere.

[upper fable]

Reflection probes can be used to control reflections locally

[wintry ether]

why while moving camera editor eats 30ms?

thats like 160 fps -> 30 fps

[upper fable]

How is that #archived-lighting related? Maybe ask on #💻┃unity-talk

[timber lichen]

Hello, I'm watching Brackeys tutorial regarding 2D Lighting. So, I'm wondering which of the several options I'm supposed to choose that is supposed the same as the "Pipeline Asset" option in his video?

[deft fiber]

It's not the Renderer because that exists on both, so the only logical one left is URP asset

[timber lichen]

Thanks.

[pastel storm]

Is there a way to visually debug whether a cast shadow is realtime or from a shadow map?

[silk ledge]

Hello! Any idea why my starfield skybox looks so pixelated?

/compressed if you click on the piecutre you'll see what i mean

[silk ledge]

i am using vr btrw

[silver onyx]

Can someone give me a hint of why i cant make area light to work ? Im using Unity 2020.3.22f1, and i chosed render mode - important + generated lighting, but it just doesnt want to show up

[deft fiber]

On Render Pipelines besides HDRP, area light is baked only
Follow the usual process for baked lightmapping

[silver onyx]

i dont get this area light, why it cant be like a point light , i think ill skip trying to use it for now, not ready for it yet

is there any other way except using area light to achieve this mesh like light reflections on a car i draw with red line ? using point lights gives round reflection which doesnt match the mesh shape

[deft fiber]

Box-projected reflection probes would be the best option here

[deft fiber]

Lights that are a different shape than points are a huge deal more complicated than punctual lights in realtime rendering

[silver onyx]

that worked very well, i appreciate your suggestion, thank you

[main wolf]

check your skybox import setting and see if it's using any compression

[silk ledge]

Thanks! Where would I find that?

[main wolf]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-TextureImporter.html

[fringe otter]

I'm currently following a tutorial for planet generation and I've run into this issue with the lighting being bad along the seams presumeably due to there being multiple normal vectors at the vertices along the seam. I'm new to unity/3d modeling/rendering objects so I was wondering what the best way would be to deal with this

^picture for reference

[main wolf]

Since it's a planet, you can just recalculate the normals by substracting vertex position with object center

[upper fable]

Works only assuming its perfect sphere

[agile tinsel]

Hello guys, I'm trying to animate the material of a skybox material, specifically it's rotation over time.

[agile tinsel]

Can anyone please help on how to do that? I have been trying for a while now and can't figure out anything

[chilly kettle]

You should show an example what you mean please

[fringe otter]

unfortunately I don't think that works since my planets aren't necessarily spheres like Aleks pointed out

right now I'm using the recalculateNormals method to get the normals

[upper fable]

If thats the case, you have split those hard edges. You should share the vertices if you want smooth shading

[fringe otter]

could u elaborate on what you mean by splitting the hard edges

for context, im currently getting the sphere shape by first generating a cube, then normalizing the distance and applying some noise to get some random variation

[inland solar]

Are light probes and raytracing the only 2 ways to get lighting on dynamic objects in real-time? Just checking

[woeful otter]

Hey all. does anyone know what is the best lightmap resolution and light map size for mobile?

Unity docs don't really have platform specific settings

[upper fable]

By splitting edge I mean the triangles on both sides of the edge are connected to separate vertices. Do you know how to make smooth shaded and flat shaded cube?

For smooth shaded cube you would need 8 vertices and 24 for flat shaded

[fringe otter]

nope lol. Right now I have defined an array of vertices, and the triangles are just defined as indices for that array of points

[upper fable]

Try to understand how smooth shaded cube and smooth shading works in general to find out what you need to do

[fringe otter]

thanks for the pointers, i'll check it out

[wise hawk]

Hey guys

do you think it would be possible to manually combine lightmap textures to improve batching?

With my GPU, I can't bake above 2048 due to video memory limitations, it falls back to CPU right away and never completes (I left it running for almost 2 hours)

I haven't looked into the problem very deeply yet but I'm wondering if it would be possible for me to manually edit the lightmap textures so that they're all on a single sheet and then somehow change the lightmap indices and UVs for all the objects in the scene so that it uses one single lightmap. I want to do this to try to improve the batching

[wise hawk]

If you're using the Mesh.RecalculateNormals , it does not work correctly. You can't set what the limit angle for hard edges are and it usually produces incorrect results anyways for me

I recommend manually calculating your normals and tangents instead

[chilly kettle]

Whats wrong with 2048 lightmaps?

[wise hawk]

Here's a writeup on the topic: https://schemingdeveloper.com/2014/10/17/better-method-recalculate-normals-unity/

[wise hawk]

Batching breaks if objects use different lightmaps

I didn't think much of it initially but I'm doing optimization today and I was looking at the frame debugger and every 3rd drawcall is broken. My scene is really big and there's 10 lightmaps!

I think I might be able to "fix" it by manually batching instead of just using automatic static batching to make sure objects in the same general visual area use the same lightmap, but it feels like a lot of work

[chilly kettle]

Maybe do the full bake with CPU 😄 When this is really a GPU problem

[wise hawk]

It never completes! It hung at 99% for almost two hours

[chilly kettle]

never seen that the GPU runs full, even with a 4098 1GB Lightmap 😄

[wise hawk]

And it was using 15.5/16gb of memory, on the CPU

[chilly kettle]

Weird

[wise hawk]

On the GPU it gives me a CUDA out of memory error almost instantly

[chilly kettle]

If you have some Dollars, give "Bakery" a try

[wise hawk]

I've been looking at that yeah

[chilly kettle]

using it for years now

[wise hawk]

I just don't really care about all the extras so I was hoping to find another solution!

[chilly kettle]

i cant help you with your problem, sry ^^

I can just recommend Bakery for everything 😄

[wise hawk]

Do you know if Bakery works on top of the regular Unity lightmapping system? As in, does it loads its lightmaps into the regular lightmap data?

'Cause if it does I should be able to come up with some black magic to combine the existing 2k lightmaps

[chilly kettle]

it has its own Bakery tab where you can change all the settings. The baked lightmaps finally fit in in the normal unity lightmap system after bake.
Just some Lightmap-Debugging Views do not work with bakery

[wise hawk]

That's promising

[chilly kettle]

There is a very detailed documentation

[fringe otter]

i don't know how to do that 😅

Are there any resources you'd recommend I check out aside from what Aleksi mentioned

[keen elbow]

How can I remove jittering with lighting?

like I have a model moving through the scene and the shadows are working well for the most part, but tend to jitter as the model is moving between lights

I need the lighting to be smooth

[little condor]

I'm not sure what version of Unity you're using or what render pipeline or what type of light, but have you tried playing with the light properties to see if anything changes?

[keen elbow]

2021.3 with the URP

its tried a bit and have improved the shadow quality and shadow rendering distances

[little condor]

So this is for a directional light, or point lights?

[keen elbow]

one directional light and 5 spot lights

[little condor]

Might need to see a screenshot or something

[keen elbow]

yea, though it is a apart of a nda project so I cant show it much

just wondering if there was a possible small thing im missing that would get it working correctly

still a bit new to lighting

[little condor]

Usually, the jitteryness of shadows comes from bias, which can be tweaked on the directional light. But I'm not sure if that is what your issue is related to:

[keen elbow]

that has helped out quite a bit already

I think the spot lights are still causing issue, but a lot of the jitter I saw on the back of the model has been removed

[little condor]

Also, in your Assets > Settings folder, you can adjust the shadowmaps settings for each High, Medium and Low quality setting. Check if you shadow maps are using just 1 cascade count. You might want o bump that up to 2,3 or 4. This is just for directional lights though.

[wise hawk]

It's just a bunch of math, but the basic method is to consider all triangles a vertex is attached to, compute the normal of the triangle by getting the cross product of the vertex positions then average all those normals to save it into the vertex. If you want, DM me and I'll give you a more step-by-step of it. It's not that complicated but it's definitely not extremely straightforward if you don't understand vector math very well

[wise hawk]

https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/1562/how-to-calculate-surface-normals-for-generated-geometry

To actually do this in my mesh generation code I calculate the normals per triangle for the whole mesh, then I check which triangles a vertex is connected to, add all those normals together then normalize it. There's additional steps if you want to do angle limiting and smoothing groups and other things... It gets pretty complicated

[keen elbow]

I do have a 3 cascades with lighting

[keen elbow]

im not sure how to fix this shadow jitter

its like as the model is moving along the shadows vary in intensity and shape

and i dont get why

i have lighting settings similar to other projects ive seen so far

and the shadows on their models isnt jittering about

and the lighting seems todisappear when the model gets tooclosethe the camera

[fringe otter]

makes sense, this was the approach i was thinking of, but finding all the normals that corresponded to a single vertex seemed kinda annoying

i also don't really know the scale of reasonability when it comes to what kinds of computations you can afford to do

i'd assume making some sort of map that maps vertices to normals is probably pretty expensive

[wise hawk]

It's pretty fast. My normal recalculator thing runs within one normal frame without any problems, along with all the other mesh generation bits

I didn't even write it well, it's super sloppy and uses tons of lists and dictionaries with allocations everywhere!

[deft fiber]

It could also be the pixel light limit
Depends on what you mean by jittery

[fleet tiger]

hey, is it possible in the urp to manually force a light to render its shadowmap from code and return it, like how you can force a camera to update using Camera.render ? and if yes, is it possible to exclude dynamic object from that shadowmap?

talking about the shadowmap that's basically a depth buffer from the PoV of the light by the way

[deft fiber]

Not sure
What'd be the purpose of that?

[fleet tiger]

I'm working on volumetric lights and right now it uses the lights's shadowmap to have shadows in said volumetric lights
problem is, with baked lighting in mixed mode, those shadowmaps only include dynamic objects, and thus the volumetric lights go straight through static surfaces

I'd like to be able to precalculate those shadowmaps, store them, and then at runtime sample both these precalculated shadowmaps and the realtime ones for volumetric shadows

I think HDRP has some function to manually update light shadowmaps but I didn't see anything like that in URP

[deft fiber]

Even if that's outside of my expertise, knowing that it's for volumetrics and URP is a lot more to go on
Though I wonder what lighting mode you're using for baking? With baked indirect and shadowmask mixed lights should automatically treat all geometry as dynamic and occlude properly

Only subtractive mode has the limitation of not including static geometry in mixed light shadow mapping

[fleet tiger]

Using shadowmask right now
Maybe something changed between versions?

[deft fiber]

I kind of doubt that, as I understand the point of shadowmask mode is to be able to combine static geometry with realtime lighting in this way

[fleet tiger]

Yes, but the shadows in shadowmask mode come from shadowmaps that are relative to each static objects's surface, not the shadowmaps that are from the light's PoV

If you bake a scene in mixed and then check the realtime shadow maps in the frame debugger, you'll see they only include dynamic objects

[deft fiber]

Oh yea that makes sense, my misunderstanding
Of course the light would go "through" but be masked out

So that leaves baked indirect as an option, I think

[fleet tiger]

I'll look into it, problem is then the actual shadows displayed on surfaces of dynamic objects are no longer baked
I get why it's that way, it'd be redundant if not make shadows worse to include static objects in real time shadowmaps if they already have their shadows baked, just wished I could tell lights to also render a lightmap with static objects included lol
I imagine my best option right now is to have some custom editor script that spawns camera on all of the lights, get them to render a depth texture of all the static stuff, and save that somewhere, hope it won't be too annoying to get the camera's FOV, resolution, etc to match the lights

at least I can do it in a lower resolution or something

[wise hawk]

Doing the camera solution is gonna be pretty tough. Some of the views are upside down and I couldn't figure out the rule for the orientation of the top camera

I think maybe the easiest way would be to just put it in the mode where dynamic objects get shadowed and then manually re-create the behaviour by using culling layers

Since you can sample the shadowmap texture, when you need it "on demand" just enable the light, sample the texture once then disable it

[fleet tiger]

I'm only worrying about spot lights right now for what it's wirth

good idea tho

[wise hawk]

Unity shadowmapping is pretty weird to play with

I wish it was less blackboxed

[fleet tiger]

like many things in unity to be fair

well, "fair"

[wise hawk]

I just found out yesterday that although you can provide your own lightmaps, UVs, textures, directionality etc. It resets it every time you enter play mode. Including the UVs for all the objects in the entire scene :^)

[fleet tiger]

lol

[wise hawk]

After spending 2 hours learning C++ again so I could build an EXR combining program by using OpenEXR, yep, the real issue is that Unity doesn't serialize the lightmap settings anywhere

For only spots I think you could do it manually like you said

It shouldn't be too hard to re-create the lighting function since it just samples a texture for falloff. But at the same time, getting your shader to behave the same as the normal lighting might be difficult

[fleet tiger]

I don't really need it to behave the same as normal lighting as actual surfaces will still be rendered with normal lighting
I only really need those spotlight depth textures in post processing when it comes to rendering the volumetric lights

[wise hawk]

Any chance you could like

make two lights

[fleet tiger]

in which case I'm gonna use them very differently than what they're made for anyway

[wise hawk]

One is set to hard baked, one hard realtime

[fleet tiger]

yeah like you said earlier

I sent it to the other person I'm working with, we'll prolly look into it

oh nvm I see what you mean
Wouldn't it result in static objects receiving realtime shadows on top of the already baked ones tho

[gaunt bloom]

Is one of my settings horrible or something? Because I get these weird lightmaps always in URP. Any advice for better lightmaps?

[keen elbow]

I mean that as the model is walking, the shadows seemingly vary randomly in intensity and look very splotchy

they look very rough

[deft fiber]

A picture or a video would save the guesswork

[keen elbow]

I am a bit limited in what I can show due to the project, but this might help

the. floor shadow I. know. can be adjusted

but the body shadow is being tricky to adjust

and when it moves, it looks splotchy

[keen elbow]

the shadows move around unnaturally when moving

I cant really find anything about tthisproblem

they still look kinda ugly at 4k

[little condor]

The shadow map size looks like it might be quite small, so try uping the resolution to get a clearer shadow. If you're using URP/HDRP, you might be able to get some additional sliders if if you click the elipse on the Shadow component. Play with those sliders to try an improve the shadow:

[keen elbow]

there arent anymore sliders

[little condor]

You don't see these on the Directional light?

[keen elbow]

no

my directional light shadows look completely different

[little condor]

Ah, well you have the Bias and Near plane sliders there already. Normally adjusting those can fix shadow issues.

[keen elbow]

I playedaround with them a lot yesterday

it helped wth the shape, but not the blotchness and weirdshadow movements

and the cascades still had some really ugly seams to them

is there a guide or something onn shadows?

cause, like im not really sure how I can improve this at this point and I know its not satisfactory

[little condor]

If you're using URP, go to your Project Settings and click on Quality. Are you using the Low, Medium or High quality settings?

[keen elbow]

medium

a medium im making

[little condor]

The medium quality shadows are quite low quality. Select your 'UniversalRP-MediumQuality' asset in the Assets/Settings folder, and then up the cascade count from 1 to 3. See if that makes any difference:

I just tried it out on a new URP project and that seemed to fix the blotchy shadows for Medium quality

[keen elbow]

its at 4 already

and it. has improved it

but apart of the problem is I do need the character to be right up near the camera

[little condor]

Hmm, I'm not sure then. Being close the camera should be fine because the first split in the cascade dedicates a texture to everything in the 5 meter range, so it should be sharp.

You defiantely seletected the correct quality in the settings like this?

[keen elbow]

yup

[little condor]

Do you see any difference if you swap to High quality and Low quality?

[keen elbow]

some differences yea, both looks worse, thought that is in part cause i havent touched them yet

[little condor]

One more thing to try before I run out of ideas. Have you tried reducing the size of your split 1 cascade? Instead of using 5m, use 1m. That will improve shadow quality that is close to the camera.

[bitter furnace]

light leak on a plane

[bitter furnace]

fixed it with near plane on lighting

[fringe otter]

spent so long trying to think of a way to do this without being absurdly wasteful, finally think i have something working lol

[wise hawk]

That looks good! You should test it with a more wacky planet shape

[fringe otter]

was confused when my map was behaving weirdly until i realized that using vector3's as a key inside a map didn't work so well 😵‍💫

[wise hawk]

yea

In other news, unity fix recalculatenormals pls

[fringe otter]

looks fine, although now im noticing that turning it on higher resolution seems to be a lot slower

the thing is that the issue before with the seam got resolved once i turned the resolution up so maybe i just wasted all this time for nothing 😢

hmm actually the seam is still visible with the old code so i guess i just have to optimize my current solution

thanks for all the help tho dizzie

[wise hawk]

Inigo Quilez has some stuff on how to do normals more faster

https://iquilezles.org/articles/normals/

I haven't actually read it but I saw that page when I was looking it up earlier

[fringe otter]

i'll check it out, i don't think its an issue with the normal calculation tho

what i ended up doing was just using recalculate normals like before, but added an extra step after all the face meshes were genereated

where i just looped over all the vertices and grouped the ones that were roughly the same

[wise hawk]

hahaha

That's one way to do it

I dont think their function is especially fast though

[fringe otter]

that's prolly true, but testing it with just their function vs their function + my new code has a very signficant downgrade in speed lmao

so before i work on the normal code i probably have to find a better way of doing what im currently doing

[wise hawk]

You shouldn't need to if you do it yourself

What's happening with recalculatenormals is that it creates hard edges at limit angles

That's basically duplicating verts right

It has to create two overlapping verts with different normals to create the hard edge, which is what you're welding after

[fringe otter]

i think so? I'm not actually really sure how all the normal stuff factors into the lighting

i just have multiple distinct normals at the points where my different faces intersect

which could be an issue with what you're describing above, i have no idea lol

i just saw that i had multiple normal vectors in some places when i tried to debug this

[wise hawk]

The colour of the lighting is defined by difference in angle between the lightsource to vertex and vertex normal

Like this

[fringe otter]

ok, why are the normals so different at the intersection points then?

[wise hawk]

And since it's per vertex, the only way to have hard edges on like a cube for example is to have multiple vertices with their own normals

So this is happening:

Then the faces along each edge of the cube are connected to the verts which face in the right direction

The reason why RecalculateNormals does this is so that if you call it on a cube, you don't end up with a weird smoothed box that lights wrong

Normally you would be able to specify the angle for the limit, if you look in the mesh importer there's a slider for it

for some reason though Mesh.RecalculateNormals has no such argument

It also breaks if you have overlapping faces that go in different directions, like a billboard or something. It's pretty bad in general

[fringe otter]

hmmm

[wise hawk]

yea

Exactly that xD

[fringe otter]

so i did notice while testing that my cube has some funny lighting lol

[wise hawk]

It's lighting it like a sphere basically

[fringe otter]

yeah thats what my normal vectors are like

[wise hawk]

I think the reason why they haven't fixed it is because recalculating normals is kind of a straightforward problem, so anyone doing really major procedural mesh stuff probably already knows how to do it

[tribal wolf]

I LOVE LIGHTING

[fringe otter]

can you elaborate on this? I guess from the way I'm looking at it rn, the behavior with the lighting on the seam in my original picture is what's intended to happen. Like for example if I wanted to generate a 100-gon, i would want the edges to show up even if the normals at the edges are quite similar. If my intent is for the edges to not show up, then I need to apply my own processing to the resulting normals i get

or i could try to generate the normals manually if i wanted to be more efficient

but to me it doesn't seem to be an issue with recalculatenormals, rather just an incompatibility with what I wanted and what the intended behavior is

[burnt jay]

I still haven't found a solution to this is someone could help me i would appreciate it

[static pasture]

Cant find anything online about it
When you create custom light map uvs, How do you designate the index the uvs should use?, uvs i have will end up in a max of 3 indexs unless i can clean it into two.

any insight on this would help.

[burnt jay]

i don't know much about lighting. i have no directional light in my scene and am just using emissive materials for the light with a few post processing affects that don't seem to affect the baked light. the only thing ive changed on the objects are making them static and decreasing there size in the lightmap so its not too big. these are the settings im using

[chilly kettle]

Normally Unity puts the Lightmap UVs in the second UV Channel..
UV0 is for Textures, so UV Lightmaps will normally be placed in UV1

[static pasture]

That much i know, bit i'm unsure is how uv1 gets split into indexes, unitys auto lightmaps do it, but am wounding when making custom lightmaps if you have any control over indexing

[chilly kettle]

what do you mean with indexing

[static pasture]

this thing

[chilly kettle]

The Lightmaps UV channel is per Object. So it should not care about the number of Lightmaps you have.
Some Objects are in Index 0 Lightmap, some objects in the index 5 lightmap.

[static pasture]

issue is the amount unity creates when the scene is not one massive object but many small ones

if i have control i can turn the current 8 down to 3

[chilly kettle]

Normally, Unity will pack them together in as few as possible

As you can see here, it packs a bunch of Objects into them

But yes, the blank space could be used better

[static pasture]

the auto packer leaves massive dead spaces like this in every index sadly, software im using does a much nicer job

bit rough since i need to finish unwrapping a few loose bits

[chilly kettle]

Then uncheck "create lightmap uv" in the import settings of the object

then unity use the one from blender

[static pasture]

But it comes back to the indexing problem :p, if i have 3 of them, how do i tell unity not to mix it into more

Also how do i let unity even know it's 3

[chilly kettle]

hmm

[static pasture]

wait, if its 3 fbxs

i think it's 1 per fbx

maybe

[chilly kettle]

do all 3 fbx have the same UV?

[static pasture]

is just one big fbx atm with alot of smaller objects within it

[chilly kettle]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmap-index-and-draw-call-batching.688780/

see this thread

could be your problem

[static pasture]

o:

that has the keyword i was after

https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/LightmapParameters.html

It's a "Baked Tag"

[chilly kettle]

fine ^^

[static pasture]

ty ty, will need to test it when i wake up

[wise hawk]

The issue is that it doesn't allow you to decide what the limit angle is

Like it's probably set to... i dunno, 60 degrees?

So any edge that's over 60deg. gets split automagically

In other words it's only ever useful if you're in the narrow case where you want hard edges at 60 degrees

[wise hawk]

Are you asking how to set which UV channel to use or which texture?

Baked Tag and System Tag don't determine which lightmap texture is used, they're just to ensure the objects are grouped together when the lightmaps are auto-generated

If you want to set the lightmap texture manually, it's in the renderer

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Renderer-lightmapIndex.html

I've been working on this problem for the past 2 days to try to atlas all the lightmaps into one big one

Unfortunately, the lightmapIndex and other lightmap settings including the textures themselves are not serialized in the scene. It doesn't say where they save, I'm guessing it's inside the LightmapData.asset file but since there's no information anywhere on how to read it and it's a binary file, it's not looking like a very good solution

You can just set the lightmap index/UVs/textures manually every time you load the scene, but for me it didn't work. Entering play mode reloads the scene and then if I re-apply the lightmap data while in play mode it just gets all scrambled

also Baked Tag and System Tag don't even guarantee the objects will be atlased together. It's a recommendation

[fringe otter]

wdym by limit angles? 60 degrees relative to what?

[deft fiber]

The angles of the corners between any adjacent polygons

[fringe otter]

I might be missing something, is recalculate normals doing something more than just setting mesh.normals?

I guess I don't see the relevance between recalculate normals and the limit angles

[fringe otter]

Prolly way off the mark but is this saying that any intersection of two faces in which the normal angle differs by more than ~60 degrees is rendered with the seam? And there's an option to change the limit at which the seam is rendered?

[wise hawk]

Yeah basically

There is no option though using Mesh.RecalculateNormals

and that's the issue, since that might not fit the model you're using. I'm not saying it's literally 60 degrees, I actually don't know what the limit is since it's not written anywhere

If you go in a mesh's import settings there's an option to recalculate normals with a limit slider. If you drag it around you'll see what I mean

I think the correct term for this is smoothing angle

[robust hearth]

a very simple question... is it possible to have 2 directional lights and make 1 camera to use just onne of them and another camera use the other?

well actually is the same light, but on one camera i want that light to always have the same angle but not on the other one

[chilly kettle]

https://answers.unity.com/questions/525812/light-show-only-in-specific-camera.html

[robust hearth]

thanks a lot

[deft fiber]

@chilly kettle @robust hearth This seems to be the way, only note is that according to some threads, newer versions of Unity also need OnPreCull
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47974391/unity-3d-how-can-i-have-directional-light-on-for-one-camera-and-off-for-another
On Scriptable Render Pipelines the process would be different, I think

[robust hearth]

oh

i have the built in render pipelinne

gonna try thanks a lot

[robust hearth]

@deft fiber @chilly kettle , worked perfectly but just addinng the OnPreCull 👍 thanks!!!

[chilly kettle]

Nice

For most problems, you are just one google search away from the solution 😄

[robust hearth]

actually i saw the post you shown me but it was so old that i didnt trust it 😅

sorry about that

[wispy steppe]

Anyone know why this is happening ?? build is messed up! even fog gets messed up with reflections from far distance... Built-In Pipeline. Baked.
Please @ me if you can help me, thxx

[chilly kettle]

Maybe your Quality Settings are low for the build?

[wispy steppe]

Do I need to bake in Ultra settings if I want players to choose if they want Ultra or Low settings? or do I bake with each graphic setting ?

[chilly kettle]

Im quite sure you have to build in the highest quality you want your game to run with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvjiJtnlAs8

[wispy steppe]

Ok thanks! my issue was my dropdown index was inverted so it auto switched to low quality 😣 oop

[chilly kettle]

you builded with high quality now?

[gaunt bloom]

I just baked subtractive lights in my scene, where the only dynamic object is the player here. Why does the players shadow get darker in baked shadows though? Am I missing something?

[chilly kettle]

Looks like your Geometry does not block your lightsource

[gaunt bloom]

You mean these buildings?

[chilly kettle]

Yeah. i think the directional light goes through and casts an additional shadow from your Character on the already baked shadow from the Building

[gaunt bloom]

hmmmm, I wonder whats causing that...

Because those buildings have shadows on

[chilly kettle]

Can you show the Settings of the light

[gaunt bloom]

Here ya go!

Are two sided shadows causing this? Those buildings have two sided shadows

[chilly kettle]

Culling Mask is set to Player.

means the light ignores the building (if its Layer is not Player)

If you set the Buildings Layer to "Player" for a second, it should solve the problem

[gaunt bloom]

Oh yea

Lemme try

Nope

No shadows at all this time

I put the buildings in Ignore Directional Light

layer

[chilly kettle]

The Layers you activate in the Culling Mask mean, that they light only gameobjects that use this layers

[gaunt bloom]

Understood, but its not working either way around

[chilly kettle]

Both cubes have Layer "Battle"

if i give one cube the default layer now, he wont throw shadows anymore nor receive light.

Means your Building and Players Layers have to be activated in the lights culling mask

[gaunt bloom]

I understand, thanks, but it doesnt work

[chilly kettle]

😵‍💫

[gaunt bloom]

Ikr XD

[chilly kettle]

i hate mixed lights

Can you use one baked and one realtime? 😄 haha

[gaunt bloom]

Me too

[gaunt bloom]

I suppose thats possible?

Havent tried

Can two directional light be in the same scene?

They totally can !

[chilly kettle]

Sure

[gaunt bloom]

Thanks a lot for the help!

[chilly kettle]

i always have problems with mixed lights.. never get them to work

[chilly kettle]

But i the end, you have a realtime light now, thats now 100% what you want i think

[gaunt bloom]

No it honestly isn't but what can we do 🤷‍♂️

[chilly kettle]

Did you try "baked indirect" and "Shadowmask" when baking the mixed lighting?

because substractive does exactly what you didnt want: "Static Gameobjects receive real-time shadows from dynamic GameObjects"

Maybe @deft fiber has an idea 😄

[chilly kettle]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/lighting-mode.html

[deft fiber]

What's the question in a nutshell?

[chilly kettle]

@deft fiber why the shadow of the player is adding to the already baked shadow using substractive mixed light

[deft fiber]

That's the expected result with subtractive lighting mode

Because shadows are baked into the lightmaps, Unity doesn’t have the information it needs to accurately combine baked and real-time shadows at runtime. Instead, Unity provides a Realtime Shadow Color for reducing the contribution from the lightmap to create the illusion of a correct blend between baked and real-time shadows. You can also tweak the color to achieve a certain artistic style.

So it's a good idea to try baked indirect or shadowmask, though they have their own performance considerations

[chilly kettle]

Adjusting the realtime shadow color is THE way to get a good result with subtractive?

[gaunt bloom]

Oof well lemme try

[deft fiber]

The only way, aside from never allowing realtime and baked shadows to overlap

[green ridge]

Hey, I'm new to lighting but I was wondering if light probes wouldn't allow dynamic lighting. For example my project was a day and night cycle. From what I read light probes store data for lighting dynamic objects by baking it. Does that mean if I were to use light probes even if the game is in the night cycle it would light up dynamic objects as if it was daytime?

[chilly kettle]

Thats correct

[green ridge]

So using light probes in my game wouldn't be an option unless it's something like an indoor space unaffected by the day / night cycle? If not Ik from my understanding that lights are pretty expensive, and having each one make realistic shadows / etc. can be taxing on performance. If I can't use light probes do you recommend any other solution?

[chilly kettle]

There are several Assets that can switch and blend between Lightmaps. I dont know wether they also blend Lightprobes or not.
But there are also tutorials who explain how to do a day/night circle and many forum posts like this:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/night-to-day-transition-with-baked-lightmaps.515564/
I think you can go with mixed lighting.

[green ridge]

Awesine thank you so much!

[tired mirage]

lighting is turning off in game randomly. if someone could that be great, @ me

[deft fiber]

You'll need to be more specific than that

There are many different types of lighting and many different ways they can "turn off"

[tired mirage]

the lighting I'm using is point Realtime without shadows, it only happens with one of the lights. it happens when you are looking a specific direction (rotation axis; 0 -90 0)

[wraith mica]

Hi there! I was messing around with my lighting in Unity for one of my scenes. I wouldn't say that there are very many objects in the scene but I seemed to have caused some lighting issue. These background tasks have now popped up trying to "Bake" and Globally Illuminate the scene, these tasks seem to take forever and I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on if I've dont something wrong or what this really means? I've done some research online but im still fairly confused

[little condor]

Open the Window > Rendering > Lighting window and at the bottom of it, check to see if you have Autogenerate enabled:

Most people dock the Lighting window as a tab next to the Inspector btw.

[wraith mica]

So you recommend to have the auto gen setting set to off?

[little condor]

If you have autogenerate off then Unity won't try to rebuild the lighting everytime you move an object or add a new light. So, yeah, I recommend you switch it off.

[wraith mica]

alrighty, I appreciate the help thanks!

[knotty hinge]

Hi guys

my baked lighting changes when i enter play mode

here is how it is in scene view

here is how it is after i press play

[chilly kettle]

Maybe some Camera-, Scene- or Quality Settings

[knotty hinge]

i thought it was because i was using mixed lights

here its even worse with baked

look

how it looks in scene view

and what happens when i press play

[chilly kettle]

Working with mixed lights needs an exact plan, and what you want the light to do, because there are some different modes of mixed lights:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/lighting-mode.html

[knotty hinge]

what i posted above is with full baked lights

[chilly kettle]

Thats weird. Show me your Bake-Settings pls

And the Material of your Lights (i think this is emission?)

[knotty hinge]

yeah but emissions dont cast light (i turned it off)

one sec

i doubt it has anything to do with it

[chilly kettle]

Increasing the bounces could help, to get this effect of the lights at the walls.

i normaly work with 5-10 bounces

[knotty hinge]

dont think so man, its fine in editor view, i dont think increasing bounces would help with it completely disappearing, but thanks

I was using modular pieces, combining them seems to have fixed it

but i still dont know what was causing the problem 😫

[chilly kettle]

Weird

When you have different visuals between Editor and Game-Video, it may be some camera settings.. but its hard to tell

[knotty hinge]

yeah weird stuff,, thanks for helping 👍

[vast lily]

Please someone tell me how to fix this, I don't wanna rebuild the whole map or fix it one by one by hand.

Please help me! It's really urgent

[timber lichen]

bro you didnt even ask a question

[vast lily]

.

[timber lichen]

thats not a question

[vast lily]

My question is: How do I fix this?

[timber lichen]

thats a general question not going into the actual problem

[vast lily]

Okay here is my question: Can you stop being a fucking nerd and help me fix my fucking lighting issue?

@timber lichen ?

[timber lichen]

bye.

[vast lily]

<@&502884371011731486>

[vast lily]

.

[stark temple]

Don't swear at people who are just looking for clarification on your problem

[vast lily]

I asked for help, If I knew what was the problem, I would've fixed it myself.

I asked a question which is: How do I fix this issue.

[stark temple]

You have posted some screenshots and presumably they didn't want to guess what your issue was

[vast lily]

And he is telling me that isn't a question

[vast lily]

That's why I provided screenshots, Because I don't know what's the problem.

[stark temple]

What is the issue you're pointing to in the screenshots

[vast lily]

I don't know if it's the lighting issue, A collider issue, And shader issue.

[vast lily]

We are talking in #archived-lighting, So it's gotta be a lighting issue.

As you can see in the screenshots

The lighting is not how it's supposed to be.

The is an angular shape, Which has a square lighting

[stark temple]

Have you looked at the docs for 2d shadow casters?

[vast lily]

Good question, I have.

And I did everything

There's only one way of fixing it, And it's by hand, one by one.

And then I came here for a better solution, Because I don't know how to find a better solution.

[stark temple]

You can presumably set the shape in code, which would be the only way to automate what you're looking for

[vast lily]

I don't know how to code, And I'm using visual scripting.

[stark temple]

Here's a script someone made that makes it from the collider https://diegogiacomelli.com.br/unitytips-shadowcaster2-from-collider-component/
I can't speak to it's validity as it's literally just a Google result

[vast lily]

Okay, Thanks.

[whole frost]

heya, i was wondering if anybody knew the cause of this issue with this realtime light? i'm on URP, using deferred rendering, and also the light is marked as important

the issue is the weird darkness that appears on the elevator walls when activating another realtime light (the flashlight)

pretty much everyone i've talked to isn't really sure where the issue is coming from or what's causing it

figured someone here might know and be able to help

please ping if you have an idea of what it is, cause i may miss the message

[chilly kettle]

Do you use Realtime GI?

[whole frost]

nah, the only realtime lighting is just in the basic realtime lights, and everything else is baked which aren't causing any issues

the only global illumination is in the baked lights

i've found it is a specifically deferred rendering issue because the problem doesn't happen on forward rendering

[chilly kettle]

Why dont u use forward Rendering?

[whole frost]

mainly for the sake of avoiding the light number limit

[deft fiber]

That's a really bizarre one
I think that's worth filing a bug report for, assuming you're not using external assets for lighting

[whole frost]

haha alright, i just wanted to ask if it was something that i was just doing wrong before i filed a bug report

i think for now i'll just use forward rendering and then figure this out later

[deft fiber]

Which URP / Unity version is it on?

[whole frost]

2021.3.1f1 unity

[deft fiber]

Updating to newest 2021.3. might be worth a try

[vast lily]

Is there a way to fix the shadow caster shape automatically?

It's gotta be something like this, But is there a way to do it automatically?

[burnt jay]

I asked this question a fewe times already so this is probably the last time i will but dose anyone know why there are these weird black lines when i bake the lighting for my scene this is the only place it appears and ive set all the sizes in lightmap so they dont overlap so i cant find whats causing this issue

[chilly kettle]

i can only imagine that its a 3D Model problem

[burnt jay]

i made evething in my scene with probuilder

[chilly kettle]

Hm. Never used this ^^

[burnt jay]

also all light emitters are emissive material's

[chilly kettle]

Sorry i have no idea.. i would do some try an error and check if this object always bakes bad.
In a scene where nothing else is in it or with a directional light etc.

[burnt jay]

i did some test and for some reason seam stitching on that particular object was causing the black lines

i bake the lighting on the whole thing now to see if it works

[wispy steppe]

how to fix this in baking only? URP works fine without bake

(bad shadows)

[chilly kettle]

Can’t see anything 😅

[wispy steppe]

my game dark, turn up monitor brightness lol

but shadow messed up

@chilly kettle

No Bake

[faint shell]

boys, any idea why I can't generate lighting here ?

I already added a lighting settings

[deft fiber]

It's either lightmap UVs bleeding over or something
The reason you aren't getting replies is because there just isn't enough clues to pinpoint the issue
Repeating the question won't change that

[deft fiber]

Lightmap UV overlap most likely, check scene window debug view modes

[wise hawk]

Looks like the UV map and the lightmapper are disagreeing about pixel borders

Posting a pic of the UV map for the model would help

[burnt jay]

this is probuilders uv editor of the object idk how to find the real uv map tho if its different from this tell me how to find it and ill post it

[wispy steppe]

well $h1t.....

is this it? does this mean it's an Issue ? @deft fiber

[wise hawk]

You know

I'm not sure because I haven't used PB in a while, but did you turn on lightmap UV generation in probuilder?

Don't you have to do that manually?

[burnt jay]

yes i did

[wise hawk]

Is there a setting to increase padding?>

[burnt jay]

i think

[wise hawk]

Try that

It looks like the lightmapper is bleeding over the edges

[burnt jay]

heres what it looks like btw

[wise hawk]

Well that doesn't look like there's a shortage of padding

[burnt jay]

what should i set the padding to it currently at 8

[wise hawk]

I dont think that's the issue, there's already plenty of space between the triangles

Maybe too much even xD.

Does this happen with all spheres made in probuilder or just this one?

[burnt jay]

just this one and only when stich seams are on

[wise hawk]

I'm not sure, it looks like a lack of padding but you've shown clearly here that that's not the issue. Maybe the mesh being generated by probuilder is weird somehow? You could try exporting it to a model editor, manually welding the verts and re-importing it

to make sure it's a nice sphere with no seams in it

When I did use probuilder I had a lot of problems with the generated lightmap UVs

Like, weird layouts, overlaps, that kind of thing

One last gotcha

Check Texel Validty

that's probably not it, but if you see red areas around the seems then the problem is that there's a lightsource behind the object and light is sneaking through the backfaces.

[burnt jay]

how do i do that

[wise hawk]

You'll have to rebake the lights if you baked them a while ago because texel validity only stays in memory for a bit

Rebake your lights then go in the dropdown in scene view

Texel validity issues usually look like splotchy spots though, so I doubt that's your issue. But it takes 2 seconds to check

[burnt jay]

there are no red areas around the seams but when i turn stich seams off for that object it seems to fix itself but then there are seams you can see sooooo

[burnt jay]

i Think i might have found the issue it seams the emissive material on these steps is causing the problem and it happens at the angles on the steps idk how i would be able to fix this tho

[burnt jay]

nvm setting the steps to non static still causes the black lines

[deft fiber]

Yes, red color with texel validity and UV overlap means there's issues with them

[main wolf]

maybe try to view the scene in baked lightmap mode, see if the lines is really from the lightmap or the textures it self

[sinful matrix]

im having a really odd issue where i cant bake lightmaps at all now. like it worked perfectly on all scenes now it just doesnt work and gets hung up on various GI cleanups and i have to force shut down the editor

ok it had the weirdest fix: changing none of the parameters did anything but changing lightmap size then changing it back worked for some reason

[wispy steppe]

how do I fix it?

[hollow marsh]

I am trying to bake a lightmap for my scene but it gets messed up and a bunch of random spots of light appear in random places. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

these are my lightmapping settings

[chilly kettle]

First: indirect samples 16.000 is way to high. Set it do something like 512.
Second: how should it look like? I can only see 2 lamps

[hollow marsh]

1. Ok, I'll test that
2. The wall behind the lamps has a bunch of yellow spots of light

you can see it more clearly here

[wise hawk]

It's funny because that's what it looks like when you have too few samples but you have a ridiculous number of samples

I bake at 32/128, for reference

You can try turning on the denoiser

that might help

Under filtering

[hollow marsh]

Ight, will try that! I have a question though, can too high values in the settings make it worse or does it just make it so it takes more time?

[deft fiber]

Always check scene window lightmap debug views first when you get weird results, to rule out texel invalidity and UV overlap

[hollow marsh]

Cool, used your tips and now it looks great! Thanks @chilly kettle @wise hawk @deft fiber

[wise hawk]

I have never tried running it with samples that high, but with the denoiser it's probably not necessary

so I would cut it down just for the sake of baking times

The only times you really want super high sample counts is when you have tons of indirect light, like for outdoor lighting with a shaded interior room with windows or something. Other than that really a tiny sample count works fine for me

[chilly kettle]

What did you change?

[junior nebula]

How come objects can't go completely unviewable even when there isn't enough light? If I remove the light source, or even add an extremely low power one, I can still see everything

[coral tide]

Whenever I move the camera, my lights flicker.

It's the bloom, but i'm not sure how to fix it.

Any advice? 2021.3.3f1, global volume

[junior nebula]

I found the answer, by going to Window > Panels > Lighting > Environment and turning the Intensity Multiplier below Environment Reflections to 0 you can remove ambient light

[hollow marsh]

I lowered indirect samples, added denoiser and just checked around the scene using scene view modes

[junior nebula]

How come after baking lighting this happens?

The objects are just a base gray

[magic vessel]

So, I removed the sun because it's not supposed to be visible in the game I am making. It's pitch black but that's the only way I know how to remove the sun. However, there is supposed to be a little bit of light casted from the sky, about 4% or 5% of the normal amount that you would have it you just started your unity project. Does anybody know how I'll be able to do this?

[fickle needle]

You can just decrease the intensity of the sunlight, you can also disable shadows so it light everything

to very small amounts

Maybe what you want though is this:
Disable directional light, add HDRI sky, that way you will get universal light from the sky itself, you can control how much with the HDRI post process parameters

[magic vessel]

Alright, I'll try that soon, thanks!

[wispy steppe]

for some reason when I switch to my level from the main menu its really dark, If I play the scene directly instead from main menu, It looks as it should(image on the left)..
Anyone know what's happening

the post process is still on because the bloom is working..but it's way too dark compared...

[tall whale]

hey i was curious, does anyone have a good yt video or know about one on proper good lighting, im struggling with it, im just making a low res ps1 horror game but the lighting sucks

[fickle needle]

tough to tell, what is that grey lighting? is that fog? maybe it's missing on the right image, or settings become different

[wise hawk]

Is there any chance you're loading the scene additively?

[wispy steppe]

They both have fog but first image has the color corrector shadows is more bumped up the way it’s supposed to. I don’t think it’s the fog but you may be onto something with the lighting settings

[wispy steppe]

I was using SceneManager.LoadAsync with loading bar but switched it to normal load same issue

[wise hawk]

Using postprocessing? Camera settings? Are those objects using lightprobes?

If it's that last one just call LightProbes.TetrahedralizeAsync when loading is done

[wispy steppe]

No probes , mixed lighting but no bakes. I have PP on and it’s on the camera. I’m using URP

[wise hawk]

Is auto generate on?

And also, does this happen in a build? There's a big thread on this here:

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1264278/unity-5-directional-light-problem-please-help.html

[wispy steppe]

no, it is not on.

[wispy steppe]

the weird part is, I think it stays the same when I bake it but when I don't it loads it dark only from menu. If I start from same scene it works without bake fine

[wise hawk]

I think it's your skybox

That isn't loading properly

It looks like the ambient is different between your screenshots

[wispy steppe]

how do you think I can fix this? never happened before..

this now what it looks baked wtf

[wise hawk]

Did you try it in a build?

[wispy steppe]

not yet....I might've narrowed to this message in console Reduced additional punctual light shadows resolution by 2 to make 17 shadow maps fit in the 4096x4096 shadow atlas. To avoid this, increase shadow atlas size, decrease big shadow

I had converted this from Built-In renderer but just realized this error

reduced lights to Low shadows, error gone.. scene still kinda dark... No idea what's happening just gonna give up.

[wispy steppe]

literally this is what supposed to look like now , I tried making it brighter with Light Environment. Still dark loading from main menu..... I made a Build and it seems to look fine .. so I guess it looks right in the build but not in scene mode, I've read through the forum post but still don't understand why that happens.. I tried copying the light settings over from main menu too@wise hawk

[wispy steppe]

NVM the build is Fdup again....

dark af and all shadows are fdup

[little condor]

What's the default quality setting for your game. You have might be using a different quality in your Editor:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-QualitySettings.html