Area lights range property not supported on Android ?

Unity Engine
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1

Hey guys,

I have done some lightings tests on Unity 2022.1.2 on a PC build and I can see changing the range property of my area light affect the illumination of the scene.

Area light with range 10m :

8707173--1176129--upload_2023-1-5_14-27-30.png
8707173--1176129--upload_2023-1-5_14-27-30.png740×408 231 KB

Area light with range 50m :

8707173--1176132--upload_2023-1-5_14-28-11.png
8707173--1176132--upload_2023-1-5_14-28-11.png746×410 240 KB

But on Android build, changing the range does not affect anything, result still the same after bake.
Is that normal ? Do you also experience this ? Is there a way to go around that limitation ?

Thank you,

2

I doubt that it has anything to do with area lights. Check your texture compression settings and lightmap encoding preset. The way lightmaps are encoded can affect the final output. Different platforms use different texture encoding formats.

3

Can you point at which settings ?
I did a test with a Unity Android project with just a simple scene (plane + 1 cube) and an area light : when I bake lights with range of 10m I guet some lightmaps being created. If I change the range of my area light to 50m, I see no change.
I do not really see why the lightmap encoding options would restrict the calculation of lighting from light sources, right ?

4

Please read the following chapter in the Lightmapping Troubleshooting Guide:

5

Dear,

I did a new trial in unity 2022 LTS and found some interesting results.
See the simple scene here with only an area light, with intensity 2 and range 5 :
9444821--1325240--upload_2023-11-1_18-53-51.png

We can see at 5m that light stops (looks bad to me, should be a progressive (inverse square) fadeout.

If I change the range to 10 :

9444821--1325243--upload_2023-11-1_18-55-19.png
9444821--1325243--upload_2023-11-1_18-55-19.png739×329 37.9 KB

Now with 50 :

9444821--1325246--upload_2023-11-1_18-56-9.png
9444821--1325246--upload_2023-11-1_18-56-9.png702×294 34.9 KB

→ No change

I think maybe you can help on specifying what is exactly the range ?
I would assume it is a parameter of the light falloff calculation, but does not seem to be the case. using 10 or 50 gives the same lighting on the cubes… That does not feel right.

Thank you

6

Again, using a Windows project/build, the range parameter is taken into account correctly with a difference in calculted light when changing it.
So would that be a restriction caused by Android build ?

7

We provide API to customize falloff of lights for baking Unity - Manual: Custom fall-off
It might be worth fiddling around with that. I’m not entirely certain what is going wrong in your setup, but maybe there is a workaround to be found here