Bizarre spontaneous lighting bloom in Scene View (HDR)

Unity Engine
1

I hope someone can explain this. I’m baffled. :slight_smile:

I created a brand new HDR project. I got the example construction site scene included with it. In the editor, I created a new scene and switched over to it. I created a cylinder and a cube in the scene. They were both given the default HDR material, which I did not change. All that is in the scene is the default camera, the default directional light and these two unmodified objects (other than adjusting the cube’s X so it didn’t overlap the cylinder). They both appear black in the Game View.

Important note: as you may notice, the material on the cylinder is not the default HDR material because I was testing it with other materials. The cube, however, still uses the default HDR material and this issue was happening before I changed the material on the cylinder.

When I look at them in the Scene View, something bizarre happens. Up close, they appear to look fine:

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However, if I zoom out a little with the mouse wheel, both objects develop this crazy lighting and bloom effect:

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The further out I zoom, the more bloom appears. The weirdest part is that if I just let it sit there, the bloom steadily gets worse all by itself. Here’s what it looks like after just sitting and watching it for about 90 seconds:

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Even more bizarre, I can accelerate this increase in bloom by just mousing over the axis arrow controls on the object in the view. Eventually the whole screen is white. I can reset this bloom by zooming back in but it comes back when I zoom out again. The objects in the Game View are black the entire time. This issue occurs even when the directional light is disabled.

I can stop this effect from happening by setting the object’s material to “None”. Any other material applied to the objects (from the many included with the construction set scene) causes this problem to occur. I didn’t need to add a second object. This is happening even with just a single cube in a brand new scene in a brand new HDR project and is happening every time I create new HDR project.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what is going on here?

2

By HDR I assume you mean HDRP. (HDR means “High Dynamic Range”, and is used for colors/images, while HDRP means “High Definition Render Pipeline”).

Anyway, the reason for this is the default HD profile for HDRP projects, which has a weirdly high Exposure comp value on its HDRI sky. Assuming you haven’t created your own volume profiles yet, you can do one of the following:

  • Look in Assets/HDRPDefaultResources in your project for a DefaultVolumeSettingsProfile
  • Or, go to Edit → Project Settings → HDRP Default Settings, and scroll down about half way to “Default Volume Profile Asset”, and see all the settings there.

These are all the effects that are default in a new project. Modify them as needed, or create new profiles for various levels in your game. Specifically, to address the issue you’re seeing, find the “HDRP Sky” component, and change its “Exposure” value to something lower than 11. 0, for example. That should immediately fix the issue.

3

I did mean HDRP, sorry. And yes, that did fix the problem. Thanks so much for the help.