Hello Unity community! I have a question in regards to the lighting changes in Unity 5 and how I should approach making light sources lit. I am making an indoor scene and now with Unity 5 the ambient occlusion is working well, however I want to make the fluorescent lights in the ceiling near 100% brightness so that they look like actual fluorescent lights (but not the surrounding tiles). It’s also worth noting I am baking all of my lighting.
My question is, is it possible to somehow have the fluorescent light boxes in the ceiling 100% brightness and the rest lit by ambient occlusion? I looked around material properties and I could make it unlit which makes it 100% brightness and that looks rather unnatural. I also noticed the occlusion map section of the standard shader, so I made a map where the light boxes are solid black and the rest is 100% white but all it did was put black boxes on the lights.
If anyone knows a solution please let me know. Thanks for reading!
Make 2 area lights that fit the shape of your lights doing this. Use 1 area light facing downward with the appropriate color and intensity settings and make sure to put it lower then the ceiling. Then duplicate that same area light lift it up a tiny bit then flip it around so its facing toward the ceiling then change it’s intensity and color. Then do a bunch of light test bakes til you get the look your after. Keep in mind with so many area lights in one scene it can blow out the lighting so start small on the RGB at like 100, 100, 100 and then intensity to like 0.1 on each area light. Might even have to go lower but its a good starting point. Your test bakes will tell you if you need to go lower or higher. The area light facing upward lights your texture appearing its fully lit and the area light facing down does the job of illuminating the scene so it appears the lights are doing there job. It’s a really cool trick and looks great to.
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I’m doing my first project will all emissive materials (and a directional light/sun). I can control the intensity at runtime completely free, without any hit on performance. I have experimented with baking a certain amount of light into the scene, but i’m getting pretty good natural AO by lowering the ambient lighting and tweaking emissive material color and strength. Plus my ceiling is a single plane, no light box adding weight to the scene.
Edit: I’ve just got to say, thats the best looking door i’ve ever scene. It looks like there is dirt on it from wal-mart employees hands. Nice! I do ArchVis also, I export all of my meshes from Revit, so they are pretty low on detail. I went in and added hinges and I’m going to normal map if to get some of that detail. I want that.
Thank you both for your replies! All my lights so far have been directional spotlights so I think I will try the area light solution and see how it is. The number of lights doesn’t matter so much since mine are all baked. May also look into those emissive materials if applicable.
