How to increase ambient light?

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

I need to increase the ambient lightning for a scene.

I have some dark scenes and sometimes (especially for presentation purposes) I want the scene to be brighter. Increasing the brightness is especially a problem if lightmaps are used in the scene. The materials are not affected by the ambient light.

Does someone has a nice solution for this problem?

Thanks in advance!

2

once you have baked a lightmap onto the scene that is the lighting that you are stuck with. You could use a lightmap manager to have lightmaps of varying brightness baked and switched between them. One such manager is available on the asset store for free:

3

A bit unrelated, but can you change ambient lighting on the fly through code?

4

Can’t you just boost the ambient light color in Edit->Render Settings?

Or do lightmaps override that?

Cheers

(Lol Ninja’d :wink: )
Yes, you can change it through code: RenderSettings.ambientLight = Color.red;

1 Like
5

For objects marked as ‘static’ the materials are no more affected by the ambient light. This is, I guess, because the ambient light has already been calculated into the lightmaps.

@RoflHarris: Thanks for the link! I’ll give it a try :slight_smile:

6

Well, if your lightmap results are too dark, I would say to setup your lighting correctly and lightmap again until you get the desired results.

If for whatever reason that is not feasible, try using the built in Contrast Stretch image effect, with some parameter tweaking you can increase the brightness of the scene that way. You can also program your own image effect. Note that you need to have a Unity Pro license in order to use image effects.

7

If you don’t care about the ambient light color, a quick workaround is to go to the menu option: Edit > Render Settings and there change the Ambient Light color from black to white.