Lamp shades

[trail vault]

Hey, new to unity so currently having a hard time properly lighting up my scene. I tried emissive materials but i didn't get the result i wanted so i switched to all physical lights. I have a few lamp shades in my scene and if i turn on soft shadows, it doesn't really look good. The shade has a bit of transparency. How could i go about making lamp shades have smooth, realistic shadows?

[neon inlet]

You'd prefer to exclude the lampshade from shadowcasting, and use a light cookie to represent its shadow and diffusion instead

https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.3/Documentation/uploads/ExpertGuides/Create_High-Quality_Light_Fixtures_in_Unity.pdf
This ebook shows what kind of effect point light cookies can have in that kind of use case

[trail vault]

thanks, i'll look into it. Just found out i have to do some bake uv mapping or something. Will have to figure out that first

Got a warning saying i've 88 objects with overlapping uv's

[neon inlet]

That happens when you're baking lightmaps without enabling lightmap UV generation on the meshes

[trail vault]

i ticked generate lightmap uv's and it went from this

to this

still giving me an error, now saying pack margin is way too high

though i don't see pack margin option under lightmap uv settings as they show it on their website

[neon inlet]

What do you see?

[trail vault]

i'm assuming red is where it is overlapping?

[neon inlet]

It is calculating it automatically, which should work

[neon inlet]

Yes, but if there are no valid lightmap UVs those regions can show up anywhere

I would export the walls and furniture separately

They really don't need to share a lightmap UV

And if one of them is causing the error, you'd know

[trail vault]

Oh, so i should import the walls/house and furniture as separate fbx and then redo the lightmap?

[neon inlet]

That seems reasonable

Usually small or detailed objects would not be lightmapped at all

Instead being staticly lit by probes

[trail vault]

alright, sounds fair, lemme try

[trail vault]

yea, still need to figure out how that works :D

[neon inlet]

Related to the lampshades
If the light from the lamps will be baked, you will have to make sure the lamp itself isn't blocking the light rays
Baking allows you to get light from emissive materials, so you can simulate lampshade diffusion with an emissive lampshade material
But it will not give you quite so accurate results as a proper light cookie texture

[trail vault]

cookies, probes, all so new and confusing. My main experience is in blender so it's a lot to learn. But still, it's interesting.
I kind of managed to fake the lamp shades by duplicating the shade and setting one as transparent for soft shadows and the other as less transparent with no shadows. Definitely not the best way, but it will do for now while i fix the lightmap uvs

[neon inlet]

The same concepts exist in Blender but you aren't maybe as likely to encounter them

[trail vault]

@neon inlet After some fiddling around, i've gotten rid of most overlapping uv's. No idea why there are still a few objects with overlapping but mostly it's good.
Now i'm really clueless. I've set all objects in my scene as static. Every light is set to baked, so there are no realtime lights. I've played around with the light settings, increased direct, indirect samples, max bounces, lightmap resolution to 2k. Enabled filtering with gaussian. After all that, the bake turns out horrible. Blocky lightmaps as seen in the picture, and even worse, i don't even see most lights, the bake is just completely random.
One light appearing properly, one light appearing pixelated like here, and the rest not even lighting up/not visible. It makes creating lighting very frustrating and pretty much impossible for me.
Any help would be appreciated because i've been stuck on trying to light my scene for days now.

preview of some of them on, some of them completely off, some of them semi on, but not proper shading.

Also i've enabled double sided global illuminations to my materials.

[neon inlet]

If the light is inside a static lamp mesh, the light rays will naturally be blocked