Issues with baked lighting on iOS with Unity 5

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys, new to the forums and I’m hoping for some help!

Our project is designed to run on iPad but I have an odd issue with baked lighting. Basically, when running on iPad (not in editor or on PC builds) the lighting seems to pop-in/out pretty dramatically. See the video for reference.

We started the project in Unity 5.0.0, now we’re in 5.1.1. We’re using the Unlit shader with Lightmap support and I have also turned off backface culling as a quick fix for some of the 3D assets in the game that were made with single plane thickness in some areas.

Thanks!

2

It doesn’t look like an issue with baked lighting. It looks like occlusion culling is the issue here.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply. Do you have any suggestions for me? We’re building with the same quality settings for both iPad and PC. I’m not too familiar with graphics settings such as occlusion culling, I understand what it does but not how it’s impacting me here.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

4

Sorry for the double post, I’ve been doing some reading on occlusion culling with Unity and I don’t even have any occlusion data baked into the scene at all. Could this be an issue with PC using DirectX and iPad using OpenGL or Metal?

Thanks again.

5

Does it happen if you change materials to use standard shader?

6

I planned on investigating that next. So I’ll report back with those results hopefully by the end of the day.

Something I did confirm over the weekend is that this only occurs when using Metal. Manually selecting OpenGL and removing Metal from the list of APIs results in this issue being fixed, BUT with a drastically reduced framerate, which unfortunately falls below our target.

7

Update on this issue. It doesn’t seem to matter what shader is used. It appears that (and again, this only occurs when using Metal) when light is baked into the scene and running on iPad, any object in the scene that has duplicates, i.e. the cars, tire piles, and garbage containers in the scene share a lightmap instead of having the lightmap applied per instance of the object instead. On DX and OpenGL this behavior acts as it does in the Unity editor, with everything lit properly, but once you build with Metal and run the project, this is the behavior that occurs.

It seems like we would need to create a separate material for every object in the scene instead of being able to rely on duplicates.

8

Could you please report a bug with that scene attached and post a case # here?

9

would really like an update on this as we are having the exact same issue in 5.6