Improving visuals

[wide raft]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but I'm not sure how to go about making this scene look better. I don't know what it is exactly but I just think it looks bad. If anyone has any suggestions I'd really appreciate it and if this is the wrong place to be asking about this then I'll delete this post. I'm also developing for standalone VR so I can't layer on too many effects and things.

[ripe kindle]

Got anything you're referencing

[grim rampart]

As Mao said, we're not sure what kind of style you're going for.
But in general lighting and shadows, some normal maps can improve the quality a lot.

[wide raft]

With the limitations of VR I really wasn't considering any particular style since performance is extremely important so this scene was just made by a lot of assets and things that don't use up a lot of performance like the lowpoly trees and use of fog so I don't have to render a lot.

I tried to change it up and find a more visual interesting style then try to make it perform well after and came up with this:

The problem is I HAVE to use realtime lighting because a forest of alpha clipping trees is impossible to bake onto the terrain

which kills performance but looks really good

This is with the crappy trees

[grim rampart]

1. Never heard of not being able to bake alpha clipping materials lighting.
2. Real-time lighting can be fast enough even for vr. You'll need to investigate the performance bottleneck and optimize it.

[wide raft]

I think it's creating too much detail on the terrains lightmap which makes in unable to bake properly and it always exceeds atlas size if I raise the scale in lightmap anywhere close to having detail

[wide raft]

I've been working on it today and I realized that you can use realtime lighting in VR I was under the impression that it was wayy too performance intensive but I'm learning its not so thats cool

Idk where I got the idea from but now I know, I'm playing with shadow settings and gonna test to see if I can get above 60 fps

I've got performance issues in quite a few places that need ironed out but I think it's gonna look a lot better

[grim rampart]

I think you probably have a few misunderstandings regarding the baked lighting as well. Though, I haven't touched it in a long time, so can't really suggest anything there.

[grim rampart]

Use the profiler to determine performance bottlenecks. Don't just tweak setting blindly in a hope that it would work.

[wide raft]

Yeah idk I guess I could have been doing something wrong but it just refused to bake properly for whatever reason so 🤷‍♂️

[wide raft]

Yeah I'm trying to get better at that and learning what all those performance catagories or whatever their called mean when using profiler heiarchy

[grim rampart]

If you need help reading the profiler, share some data.

[wide raft]

Will do thanks 👍

[cyan sequoia]

Increasing "size in lightmap" will make it easier to exceed atlas size, because that makes the particular mesh consume more space on the atlas relative to others
You'd have to increase the bake Resolution as well as Max Lightmap Size
But you might not want to, lightmapping is very inefficient for capturing detail
But with Mixed lighting you can have baked indirect light as well as the high detailed shadows and accurate specular of realtime lights, if you can afford them

[wide raft]

I made the bake res the max and played around with the scale but the only time it worked was when scale was too small to capture enough detail to have discernable shadows or maybe it just broke

other than that it would have some sections of detail and the rest would be huge square chunks of black or grey lighting

as if it ran out of resolution or something idrk

[cyan sequoia]

I don't think there is a maximum bake "resolution"
Could be a case of mixing up resolution and "max lightmap size"

[wide raft]

uh yeah I'm probably calling everything by the wrong name mb

resolution is diff lol

[cyan sequoia]

They are confusingly similar terms in this context

[wide raft]

I maxed out the lightmap size and res was like 20-30

[cyan sequoia]

This sounds like what occurs due to texel invalidity, or possibly due to high frequency environment / lack of multi-importance sampling
But hard to diagnose without seeing it

[wide raft]

Yeah sometime later today I can try to get some images of it and my settings

I don't have the assets in the scene technically right now since I normally generate the placement with a script cause placing a forest by hand would take forever

so I have to copy them over from playmode to bake

probably should just make an editor script for that

[cyan sequoia]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GIVis.html
You'll likely need to use these
It can be used to diagnose texel invalidity, and also to confirm that the lightmap texel density for each mesh is what you actually expect, so Resolution * Size In Lightmap
If meshes were exported/imported at wrong scales they can get wildly wrong lightmap resolutions

[wide raft]

I'm using unity terrain so I think it should work tho

[cyan sequoia]

In Terrain's case there should be no import issues
But it's possible for other objects

[wide raft]

Wouldn't that just affect the lighting of those objects though not the terrains lighting?

[cyan sequoia]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/
Info about texel invalidity in c.15
High frequency environment noise in c.14, although it can take many appearances

[wide raft]

Can't I use the texel invalidity view in unity and look for it that way?

[cyan sequoia]

Yes, resolution issues should only affect the particular mesh with the problem
Whereas other issues like texel invalidity and high frequency environment noise can appear anywhere

[cyan sequoia]

Yes, as detailed by the second to last article
But those views only work if you've baked the current scene during the current editor session, as debug data is temporary

[wide raft]

gotcha

I'll take a look at it later and report back thanks

[wide raft]

@cyan sequoia I tried baking again and if I raise the samples up any more than like 2-32 it gets issues. I checked in texel overlap mode and it's just red on everything everywhere. I'm not really sure what to do about it I haven't run into this issue before any suggestions?

[cyan sequoia]

By "texel overlap" do you mean "UV overlap" or "texel invalidity", or both
Both appear as red in debug view if present

[wide raft]

texel invalidity yeah mb

I thought it had something to do with overlap of lightmaps and things so I mixed the two together

[cyan sequoia]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmapping-troubleshooting-guide.1340936/
C.15 explains it, as well as solutions and where they're applicable

[wide raft]

Ok, I think I found the issue baking now

Double side global illum wasn't on for the leaves of the trees

so since they need both sides illuminated it causes texel valitity issues

[cyan sequoia]

Worth to note that geometry set to double sided rendering / global illumination still has just one side technically
The backface can reflect light during baking but cannot receive it
The backface will duplicate the lighting received by the front face

Not necessarily a problem, and having actually double sided geometry doubles their lightmap space also, but may lead to unexpected lighting in some cases