I have a scene without directional light or any kind of “outside” light, the whole level is lit with ceiling lights. And that’s the problem, Unity as a realtime engine can’t perform nice soft blended lights. Here’s what I’m talking about:
There’s only 3 lights and it already looks horrible with these sharp shadows (don’t mind shadow’s darkness thought, I’m on the prototyping stage)
The obvious solution would be baking light, BUT lights need to be dynamic, I need to be able to turn them off to complete darkness, which is not possible with mixed or realtime GI.
Is there a workflow with lightning for such type of levels?
Yes it is. Realtime GI is explicitly designed to allow for this. You have to use Enlighten, or you have to use shadowmasks and turn off bounced lighting.
If you’re using Enlighten (enabled with the Realtime Global Illumination (deprecated) check mark), the trick is to not use lights at all. Instead light everything using emissive materials. Then you can modify the brightness of your emissive materials via c# and it’ll update in real time. You’ll get soft shadows, bounced lighting, everything, with total control over the light’s color and brightness.
If you use the Progressive light mapper, you have to set the Mixed Lighting’s Lighting Mode to Shadowmask and set Bounces to None. Or set the lights you want to modify the intensity of to use an indirect multiplier of 0.0. I believe this works with area lights too, though those won’t have real time shadows.
I tried baking realtime GI and it works fine, I can control everything in editor without rebaking. But when I actually play the scene I can’t control emission brightness, I can see the material stops emitting light, but actial lightning doesn’t change
UPD: I figured out how to change it runtime, I should use DynamicGI.SetEmissive instead of changing material emission!
I realized that I’m only able to control overall GI intensity, but the whole point from the beginning was that I’d able to control lights in different rooms individually. Pretty straight forward with actual lights, but it seems to be impossible with emission materials