Help with lighting a complex internal scene

[gloomy temple]

I need some guidance on how to go about lighting this scene.

the complications of it:

1. almost entirely internal so cant really do much with a directional light.
2. a dicent amount of pieces move and are interactable,
3. the entire lighting can change between this kind of "calm" look and red warning lighting
4. the geometry is quite complex, and often not water tight, its messy. (and texturing very simple)

currently the screenshot you see is 100% Realtime just 23 point and spot lights, (light explorer attached for refrence, but ignore the "baked" and "mixed" modes currently I'm only using Realtime lighting with nothing baked.)

My goal is to improve performance while being able to gain more control, nuance and depth with the lighting. I see those 2 as a spectrum obviously i could just add more point lights around but then im losing performance, so im interested in how i can achieve the improved quality while maintaining performance or maybe achieve what i have for less performance and thus be able to "do more" with the additional headroom gained.

i have tried baked lightmaps but with this geometry it felt like an endless black hole of issues.

I would really appreciate any ideas, tips even just "have you tried X" because maybe I'm missing some obvious solutions =/

if you want to get a better perspective on the environment and its "motion" this video covers it well however it is outdated quality wise at this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQMEC5QtGug

once again, thanks for any and all input I am at my wits end

[pliant light]

Looks like you are missing a tiny bit of post processing, adaptive light probes, and reflection probes

Be sure to bake lighting

[gloomy temple]

the issue i have with baked lighting is the light maps always turn out terrible i suspect due to the complex and messy geometry without uv, and its prohibitively time consuming to manually author uvs for all of this geometry.

(unless i am messing somthing up some ware without realizing it?)

[pliant light]

On the model settings you can generate uvs

[gloomy temple]

when i tried to use adaptive light probes i got really noisy results, i suspect its the probes cliping into the meshes as many are not water tight?

[pliant light]

You don’t need to manually add the uvs, Unity has a way to generate it. On the model settings

[river cargo]

lightmapping tiny objects can be really annoying

Adaptive probe volumes completely sidestep that, but you need a high enough density to get anything comparable to lightmaps

The existing scene looks remarkably good for something with no baked GI

I would consider using APVs exclusively – but only baking small, soft lights

You can use lighting scenarios to switch between normal and emergency lights

[gloomy temple]

oh i havent considered this, so like using APV as like the "ambiant lighting" effectivly? then having the main lighting realtime?

[river cargo]

Yeah.

You should avoid baking lights that have long ranges if there's a lot of dynamic geometry nearby

Mixed lighting could work, though

It's harder to notice that the indirect light is wrong (especially if there are lots of places it could be plausibly coming from)

[gloomy temple]

i tried APV once before in this scene and got really bad noise, (maybe trying to do it with to few, small high owerd light sorces)

but i was also thinking maybe APV struggles to geomatry sort as most of these models are not watertight? or is that not a thing

[river cargo]

(since the shadows will wind up all wrong)

[river cargo]

Non-watertight geometry could make it harder to decide if a probe is invalid or not

If you're seeing a lot of noise, though, you probably just need to bake for longer

(unless it's an issue with invalid probes)

if the probes are going in and out of a wall, then some will show up black

nominally, you have dilation to fix that (this is VRC Light Volumes, which is a very similar idea)

but if you can't decide that one side is "out of bounds", you can't do that

[gloomy temple]

yea, that makes sence

i apriciate all the help and ideas