Bad reflections on baked lighting URP

[last spear]

So my game KILLNETIC uses a mix of low res textures and low poly models with unity default realistic lighting, so my materials are all PBR

The way i setup my scene is that use only baked lights, no skybox, ambient color and realtime shadow color is blacked, i use the same baked settings for all my scenes

i have one reflection probe per room and a lightprobe with a ton of spots per room too

my player is a skinned mesh renderer so its dynamic

and well my issue is the non metallic parts of my mesh are lit by nearby lights while the reflective one is barely lit if at all even with the reflection probe, that might not be the use of it but im not a graphics guy

with mixed lighting i achieve more of what i want which is for the weapon to lit by nearby lights with reflections and stuff, but the look of mixed lights and performance cost is nuts high, it nearly halfs fps

if the fix for this is only the mixed lights and there's no way for making em cheaper i accept ideas on custom shaders like psx maybe or techniques idk ahhahah, attached will be info about my issue

[high ermine]

Metallic surfaces are unaffected by diffuse lighting, which is provided by light probes. They only respond to direct lighting (e.g. from reflection probes)

note that a painted surface should not be metallic (the paint is non-metallic)

[last spear]

Yeah but i do have reflection probes in the scene as shown in the pic, do i have to place them differently? Also what do u mean a painted surface should not be metallic, what would be a painted surface?

What would be the propper way of doing this

[high ermine]

it depends on what your weapon is supposed to be made of

If it's all raw metal, without any paint or coating, then it should be metallic

If it has a coating on it, it's not metallic

Metals can be remarkably dark.

[high ermine]

It may help to create a "test" material and to slap it on a sphere

make it metallic + smooth and see how it looks

then vary the properties (and the base color)

I'd also want to see an example of one of the reflection probes

[last spear]

Its like a rusty iron

[last spear]

Its in the pics attached, they are all the same, thing is it reflects the environment, a bit, same thing for a test material, it just does not have specular lighting i think its the name so it doesnt get shinier and bloomy when close to a baked light source compared to a mixed

[last spear]

Reflection probes

[high ermine]

I want to see the actual reflection probe image

select a single reflection probe and look at the preview pane at the bottom of the inspector

[last spear]

Ahh, im out rn, but imma send as soon as i get home

But are reflection probes supposed to give specular lighting to dynamic objs?

[high ermine]

Yes, that's their purpose. They mostly matter for smooth materials

and they're vital for metallic materials

[last spear]

https://youtu.be/xDxRV3GeuN4

Old vid you can see how it looks close to a mixed light source, the halo and bloom thingy

[high ermine]

Light probes provide "irradiance": they measure how much light is falling onto a surface in each direction. That's important for rough materials. Reflection probes give you "radiance": how much light is coming from each direction

[high ermine]

One really important thing is that reflection probes either:

• treat the light as coming from infinitely far away

• treat the light as coming from a box

They're not going to give you intense flares as you get close to a light source

looking at a mirror ball can help you to see what's going on

(so, a sphere with a perfectly smooth + metallic material)

[last spear]

So like, i cant get the flare from reflections with reflection probes?

[last spear]

Will be trying that as well

[high ermine]

A somewhat common trick is to use light probe data to fake specular highlights

that would require custom shader work

You could also put the weapon on a different render layer and add extra realtime lights that only hit that layer

that would avoid doing realtime lighting on everything else

[last spear]

I would guess, but approaching blue lights would not reflect on the weapon, kinda messes the purpose

[last spear]

I am fine with changing shading techniques, any recomendation of styles that could match the texturing, or what i would look onto to fake the bloom/flare/highlights given by mixed lights on the weapon metal

[high ermine]

Any lights that hit the rest of the world would be set to hit both layers

So most lights hit layer 2, and some hit layer 1 + layer 2

[last spear]

Uhh, set them all to realtime? Or you mean the flare is given by a "sun" and the proximity to a baked light would affect tint?

[high ermine]

• For lights that should light up the whole world in realtime, you would change nothing
• For lights that are currently baked, you'd add a new realtime light that only hits a specific render layer

(render layers are unrelated to the layer of a game object, btw)

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@16.0/manual/features/rendering-layers.html

So you'd have:

• A baked light (which does nothing at runtime)
• A realtime light (which only hits the weapon)

[last spear]

i dont have a "sun" all my lights are placed in a room as props, so for each prop id need a sublight to affect the player layer
i can look into that which is probably a mixed light optimization i guess

but i found this by the guy that made vertigo aparently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxPTZQU6B-0

and it seems surprisingly promising, trying it in my game, and im getting close results to mixed in some lights, some are broken and dont reflect but ill see

[high ermine]

Oh, duh, I completely forgot about one really important thing

Reflection probes won't capture point lights very well because the light isn't actually a visible thing

it's just an invisible source of light