Tips on getting interior lighting working with baked lighting?

[pine plume]

Been stuck on this for a bit. After playing around with lighting and reaching a spot I like a lot for outdoor areas, I haven't found a good solution for lighting interiors. I've tried:
a) Manually setting up lights indoors and baking. Takes way too long to get an even acceptable result, let alone an appealing one.
b) Removing shadows from the main light source. This works, but it looks awful indoors and out (see image).
c) Writing a shader to increase the 'minimum darkness' of shadows. I can get this working, but it has way too many issues being consistent (without ruining the look of outdoor areas, and ensuring indoor areas aren't pitch black.)

So I need some way to keep 'shadows' working believably on the interior (so its darker overall, especially on the floor, but you can still easily see) without compromising the way outdoor spaces look.

I thought that an ambient light might be the solution (in combination with a sun/directional light), but this doesn't seem to pierce indoors, as indoor areas are still pitch black.

Not really sure where to look for something like this, any help is appreciated. If there was some sort of solution like a 'light volume' that enabled different directional light settings in a given area, that could work, but I haven't found anything of the sort.

[opaque willow]

Baking time and appearance are both very much workable issues

But it does take work, and knowledge too

You could show what kind of results you got with baking and how long it took given your lighting settings

It's possible to use the light probe system to manually control diffuse lighting per-area, in a similar way how reflection probes are used to control specular lighting locally
But there's no built-in tools to do that, they're only designed to work with light baking

So in theory you can make (or find) a tool like that
But in general utilizing the baked lightmapper for that purpose is easier

[pine plume]

hmm, interesting, I'll have a look for an asset like that

outdoor and indoor examples. baking the scene takes a couple minutes, which in reality isn't that long but it makes iterating on the lighting indoors frustrating

[pine plume]

maybe i'll just have to bite the bullet and git gud, lmao

its just having to wait minutes to see the result that makes it feel unsustainable

I've noticed you can 'preview' what baked lights look like by deleting the lightmap but that doesn't really get the 'feeling' across, only a ballpark on what's actually illuminated (which does still help I guess)

[opaque willow]

With what kind of baking settings?
Do these look "acceptable" or adjacent to that

[pine plume]

the outdoor one looks good I think, but the indoor one is barely acceptable

[opaque willow]

Minutes with Resolution of 5 and GPU baking on an RTX 3080?

Does the field below those settings report the baking stats, including lightmap sizes?

I tend to bake on a 3070 with 20 resolution and I'm used to 10 second baking times

It entirely depends on the actual number of texels to bake, and scene complexity though
But also whether your GPU is actually being utilized for baking

[pine plume]

well, minut and a half, but it feels like minutes :P

[opaque willow]

Doesn't really sound right
Not sure also why you have one 4k lightmap when your max size is 2k
Shouldn't really affect bake time though, we'd just expect to see it bake multiple 2k lightmaps isntead of one 4k

Had to check
The difference isn't that big if I try to fill a whole 4K lightmap atlas
3070 not 3060 in my case, but doesn't seem to explain why we're seeing so different things compared to your 3080

Actually forgot my scene had a whole APV volume being generated also
If I swap to an array of 380 light probes I get even better performance

For reference my test scene is very simple
But I had to bump up the effective resolution absurdly high

@pine plume How I'd like you to troubleshoot your scene is to also use the Contributors/Receivers view and Baked Lightmap views
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GIVis.html

See that only meshes that need to contribute to GI are contributing, so blue or green
And further that only surfaces that can't get accurate lighting with probes alone have lightmaps, so they're green

Then check that the lightmap texel grid for lightmapped objects looks like 5 texels per unit in one dimension
Often when you import meshes with wrong unit scales, they get varying transform scales in scene which messes up the texel density calculations

Usually by a factor of 100

If you have light probes, also check that you don't have excess of those

And that your scene isn't like, totally huge with a lot of lightmapped blank surfaces

[pine plume]

it is a fairly big scene so it may be that

I do want all of these meshes to contribute since they should all cast shadows, receive lighting etc

no probes in this scene, only lightmaps

[pine plume]

how do I check this?

hmm, there are a couple meshes that look pretty messed up but most seem ok

[opaque willow]

That's more than a bit off for sure
Make sure Generate Lightmap UVs is enabled on the meshes which will be lightmapped

And you can always set meshes to receive GI from probes to reduce lightmapping time cost, and to avoid messed up lightmaps
Or exclude them from GI contribution entirely, especially before the final bakes

[pine plume]

I managed to fix the car by tweaking the lightmap uv settings but i couldn't fix the shipping crate, might need the uvs fixed in blender

[pine plume]

might be worth looking into, haven't messed with probes too much

right so it sounds like my best course of action is to potentially find ways to speed up the baking, then just try and get better at interior lighting 😅

[opaque willow]

Yes
When testing stuff you always want to start small, preferably in an isolated scene

Baking problems can be difficult to troubleshoot because one problem may manifest somewhere completely different