We are working on a specialty application aimed at a very high degree of visual fidelity. We can achieve a very realistic look on static objects using a combination of baked shadowmasks and raytraced post-processing. However, a given scene may also have one or two moving objects which need realtime lighting/shadows.
We’re trying to used Mixed Lights for this purpose. However, several of the scenes have so many light sources that most or all of the light sources are overlapping. Because Unity only allows 4 mixed lights to overlap, every light after the first 4 is treated as a baked light, meaning we don’t have realtime lighting in most of the scene. This limitation is confusing, because we can have more than 4 overlapping realtime lights.
We can reduce the range of the mixed lights until they don’t overlap, but this drastically alters the appearance of the scene and hurts the realism.
Since HDRP is a scriptable render pipeline, is there a way to bypass the limitation of 4 overlapping mixed lights? Or is this something built into the Editor’s baking process that cannot be overridden?
This application will only be used on a few high-end systems so we’re more concerned with visual quality than performance. However, we’ve found that raytraced real-time GI is too expensive and drastically affects application usability, so we’re hoping for a solution that works with baked shadowmasks.