Anyone having much luck with realtime Global Illumination?

Unity Engine
1

I am trying to test out the realtime Global Illumination. There aren’t too many clear guides on settingit up though.

I set up a simple scene with a plane and some shapes. I made a glowing orange plane that is suppose to act as an area light with bright orange as the emmisive channel and a blue cube that should cast blue color onto the ground.

I’ve created the light probes and have placed them all over the small map where all the shapes and stuff were. However, I still see no difference.

All of my objects are not static and the “use Light Probes” option is checked. I didn’t change anything and the option for using realtime GI is set.

I erad somewhere that even with light probes, the is a precomputation stage. I can’t click Build because a “Continuous baked” checkbox is checked. I unchecked that and tried, but nothing came out.

The static GI seems to work fine, but the dynamic doesn’t seem to work at all.

What am I missing? (I also asked this on Reddit, but was hoping you guys might know too.) Thanks everyone.

2

Only static Meshes can influence the Real-time GI and not static objects can only get the real-time GI via lightporbes but not influence them.
On run-time you can change the sky-box the lights and the luminescence channel of materials (via the dynamic GI script api) and get the light situation updated in run-time.

3

Sorry, A typo or something in your wording got me a bit confused.

So if I set my orange area light plane to static, then I can move my other shapes around and they will catch light data from it?

So at runtime I can change the intensity or color of the dynamic light and it will catch, but I can’t have them moving. Is that correct?

4

Ok posting again to say I got it figured out.

So the lighting has to be static, but other objects can move around it. Cool.

I don’t know, the documentation just didn’t make that clear. Wasn’t exactly what I thought it was, but this is still pretty darn awesome. Now if only I could find a way to hide the light probes which should be pretty easy to do. Thanks again!

5

be sure that Precomputed Realtime GI is enabled. You may want Ambient GI to Realtime also…

Then have at least one realtime light (point, spot should work) to move around the scene and test with.

You should see it creating indirect bounce light on the surfaces of your static geometry (geometry that was marked lightmap static).

6

You can hide the light probes from the Gizmos dropdown at the top of the scene view.

The lighting doesn’t have to be static. Only the GI has to be precomputed.