Hi everyone,
in the global Lighting window I can set the “Ambient Source” to Skybox which allows me to derive diffuse lighting from the skybox for my scene objects (I guess via spherical harmonics?).
But how can I get diffuse lighting from local Reflection Probes? They only seem to provide specular reflections. Also, objects within the zone of Reflection Probes are still influenced by the global “Ambient Source”. I expected the diffuse/ambient lighting to be overriden by Reflection Probes, just like the specular contribution.
Essentially I need the behaviour of Marmoset Skyshop where I can get diffuse and specular contributions from every reflection probe and also dial in there contributions with sliders. That would be nice to have in Unity as well.
Or do I have to use Light Probes for the diffuse part? Will these override the “Ambient Source” locally?
Many thanks for any help!
Sean
Yes, you should use lightprobes for that.
Since they are much less resource than reflection probes, you can (and should) use a lot more than reflection probes.
Ok thanks a lot for clarifying that!
Not sure if I am doing something wrong, but do Light Probes only work with “Precomputed Realtime GI” or “Baked GI” enabled? The thing is that I already baked my GI in 3ds Max. I only need some indirect diffuse light on a single dynamic object. Calculating an entire baked or realtime GI solution seems a bit overkill just to get the light probes working.
Light probes are essentially free and enable your characters or dynamic objects to receive bounce lighting from Unity’s enlighten GI, which of course has nothing to do with your max gi, which won’t transfer to anything except vertex colour and won’t affect anything by default.
I know these are lightweight calculation-wise, but I definitely need the Enlighten GI system to be active for the light probes to work, right? There is no way to just let the light probes make a diffuse snapshot of what’s currently visible around them (even if no GI is enabled) similar to what a relflection probe does for specular reflections?
As I said, I already have all the GI calculated in Max and I would like to make the light probes see that.
If that’s not possible, how would you handle my sitation with my baked 3ds Max GI maps and the need for GI on a dynamic object?
Or is it possible to let the Enlighten make a full GI calculation (Realtime or Baked), but have it not affect any static surfaces so that only the light probes are being baked?
static geo should not be affected by probes. Mesh renderer component lets you choose if probes affect a dynamic object.
No I wasn’t taking about the light probes having the option to not affect static geo. I wanted to know if I can bake an Enlighten GI solution without ever using it visibly on static geo? That way I could keep my baked maps from 3ds Max and still bake light probes for me dynamic objects. Can this be done?
at the moment no, i think it already planned for us to bake lightprobe without baking lightmap.
@KEngelstoft mind to chime in?
Yes, our new progressive lightmapper will be able to bake lightprobes without an Enlighten precompute. It is still in an early stage, but we hope to provide an experimental preview build based on 5.4 (it will not ship in 5.4).