Bake light = extremely bright

[jolly dirge]

Hi everyone

I’m currently working on a Unity project that originally comes from Unity 2019 and is being ported to Unity 6. When I bake my scene, I get a strange issue where everything becomes extremely bright, almost like a divine light that definitely wasn’t there before :/

The project is using URP. I’ve included a screenshot of my Global Volume, although I don’t think the issue comes from there because even when I disable the Global Volume the scene still remains overexposed.

I also tested on another scene and the same thing happens: as soon as I bake the lighting, the lights become way too intense.

I’ve attached screenshots of my Lighting settings as well. All my lights are set to Static (I also included a screenshot of a typical light used in the project).

If anyone has an idea of what could be causing this, I would be really grateful for the help!

Feel free to ask if you need any additional information or something. Thanks in advance for your help, and sorry for my bad English :/

[runic latch]

Is the color space of the project gamma or linear?

There's this pretty random quirk in some if not all of the modern editor versions that using gamma space will cause the lightmapper to blow out light intensities

[jolly dirge]

Linear

[runic latch]

In that case I would try to isolate causes to outside of this scene
What lights and objects did you bake in your fresh test scene? First you'd want to use default cubes and very basic lights, so you could rule out your scene's objects as the culprit

And view the lighting without post processing before and after the bake, as it should not be relevant

If a fresh scene with default meshes still proves to be baking wrong, that means the issue is in the project itself
Either in some settings that have been overlooked, or which cause a bug, or the project has an internal issue you have no control over

[jolly dirge]

So far I tested it on a default scene where I didn't modify anything and the issue still occurred. However, when I tested Unity’s URP interior template scene, the problem did not appear.

I'll try again in a very basic scene and see what result I get.

[runic latch]

The most likely difference between the two would be that the template is using APVs, while your scene is baking to lightmaps, but I don't know for sure if that's the case

[runic latch]

Show the result before and after

[jolly dirge]

default scene before bake

[runic latch]

It is relevant which scene template you created the new scene out of

[jolly dirge]

scene after bake

I'll try adding a Global Volume now and see if that changes anything.

[jolly dirge]

nothing change

[runic latch]

There's no meshes here to bake to, so generating baked lightmaps did not do anything here

[jolly dirge]

ok yes mb

I just baked the lighting and some objects turned completely white. The objects marked as static became white, while the non-static ones stayed gray with their default material.

Is this normal?

[runic latch]

No

[jolly dirge]

Do you have any idea how I could solve this?

[runic latch]

Yes
Make a new project with the same editor version
Do the simple test bake just to be sure it does work okay there
Then you can export all your game related assets as .unitypackages to the new project
URP assets, renderer assets and project settings are worth setting up from scratch because those can get corrupted in version upgrades

The problem may be somewhere we supposedly checked already but overlooked, or it may be internal and beyond our control
In either case probably not worth the time to try to suss out

Moving assets to a new project rather than upgrading a project that's 7 years behind is a good idea for avoiding more cryptic issues like this

Though I'd recommend the new project in any case, one more thing you can try is close the editor and delete the project's Library folder
That forces the temporary files to regenerate, the engine itself basically

Version upgrade is supposed to do that but it might not always be thorough, or the temporary files can get messed up for other reasons

Doing the test bake in the new project is an important step is an important step to confirm that baking doesn't happen to be broken across the board in that version, before moving all your assets over

[jolly dirge]

Sure, I'll do that right now!

[runic latch]

And before moving all the assets it can be worth the trouble to just export the particular scene and its assets
Just in case the issue doesn't somehow carry over with those assets

[jolly dirge]

This time the bake didn't cause any issues.

I'll import my assets step by step to make sure nothing breaks, and I'll keep you updated. Thanks a lot for your help so far!

[jolly dirge]

I just finished importing all my assets. I baked the lighting and it seems to have worked
I no longer have the blinding lighting issue. However, I haven't been able to test it properly yet because I still have some errors to fix and a few plugins to reinstall (ProBuilder, etc.). I'll keep testing.

[jolly dirge]

Is there a way to create a clean FMOD package? Importing it seems to have broken all my audio files.