hmm, no, I don't believe the ambient

[keen crypt]

I mean specific settings in the mesh renderer

The mystery here is what lighting are we precisely even looking at

If you bake at night but the screenshot is at day, how did you make it go from one to the other?

How is your lighting being modified at runtime by your day/night scripts?

[olive whale]

Yes, lighting is dynamic, hence why we don't bake lights or shadows, only Lightprobes and Occlusion.
Just in order to make it vibrant and lively at night, and then essentially it all gets faded out by the strong light during the day.

[keen crypt]

"lighting" is like ten different systems working together

Some of it is dynamic, some of it is static in your case

We can't really troubleshoot this problem until we know which parts are dynamic and which are static and what's responsible for which

For example lightmap "occlusion" removes light from corners during the baking, it doesn't create any kind of separate layer of shadows

Light probes sample baked lighting during the bake exactly like lightmap texture pixels, so they can only account for static lights

[olive whale]

Do you do consulting work on this kinds of stuff? 😅 Would love to get some consulting and more general know-how on some of these things! Could be great learning for me, and could be great for us to get this knocked out.

Please do DM me if you're up for it! Otherwise we can keep it here, an I'll gladly elaborate. I would just need to know what information I'm lacking, as I am not very experienced with lighting. We had a tech artist on it, but he... disappeared..

[keen crypt]

I do that in some situations but can't presently

Hmm there isn't unfortunately any one place that explains how all the different lighting systems work together

That I know of anyway

Realtime lights only do direct diffuse and specular illumination
Baked lights do indirect diffuse (only to lightmapped objects except with light probes) but no specular (except with reflection probes)
The scene has its own ambient light probe and reflection probes, which can adapt to changes during runtime in the editor, but not in build unless you call the method to update them

Baked GI can be using lightmaps which is the standard way, or with adaptive probe volumes which are very new to unity
Realtime GI is a completely separate system and it's best to not mix it up with other systems unintendedly

In your case it's ambient light from scene probe or a probe group, and/or a reflection probe that's giving the walls their illuminated appearance

One of those systems is likely being modified by a script as the lighting changes when you enter play mode

[olive whale]

Alright, will give it another look. If you know of a good tech artist to be able to help us solve this, please have them contant me 😄

I'll get back to you with what we find. Appreciate it once again!

[olive whale]

@keen crypt
Just spotted this in my building as well, where you can clearly see something with the shadow side acting weird. Should be lit up like the wall next to it. There is no settings difference as far as I can tell on the 2 walls. Renderer and static settings are the same

[keen crypt]

There's two meaningful differences between these walls
They have different position and they are facing different directions
It is expected that due to the facing the wall on the left is reflecting light from the right, and the wall ahead is reflecting light from behind us
If the scene is using light probes or reflection probes, it's possible they are falling under the influence of different probes from each other, so the lighting may change drastically

I can't spot an obvious normal map issue but the "facing" information can become distorted if the wall's normal maps are not of type normal map, aren't in the GL format used by unity, or if there's other issues

They may also be in range of different realtime lights, if the light limit is exceeded per mesh and lights are culled, they ignore some lights while being lit by others which may explain the drastic difference
But that issue usually appears together with very noticeable flickering

Also, perhaps most importantly if you are using baked lightmaps for these walls, the black shadow may be from that lightmap expecially if there are lightmap UV issues or if the resolution is low

You could have multiple of these problems at once