Hello, rookie developer here. I was wondering if there was a to adjust the distance at which lights are drawn. I have a top down perspective, with streetlights down on ground level, but the light from them wont render due to the height of the camera. They won’t be casting shadows, so it should be less taxing to draw them from a greater distance. However, if you think it might be better to just scale my whole scene down to be smaller to save on memory, maybe I should just do that… either way I’d like to know how to change the draw distances of lights.
How far are they? From my own experience I think the editor automatically draws a certain number of lights for performance reasons. Also how many? If the lights are non-moving [static] lights then try to bake the scene then rather do unnessecary simluation. I know this doesn’t help much but these are some things to consider.
Somehow it just started working lol… but now it seems like the light is only reflecting off of the terrain, and not the roads which are just textured planes on top of the terrain…unless I zoom closer, then it reflects off of the roads…
I would like to help you, but I barely can; I will try my best.
There was an option in Unity which allows to adjust shadows distance; you can increase that value but it will cost performance.
Another option is make a lightmapping; you will have the shadows burned into the textures… with several advantajes if you use Beast:
1- Te original textures will not be affected at all
2- At near distance, you will have dynamic shadows
3- At far distance, Unity will use the burned shadows with no cost of performance.
Here is a link: Unity - Manual: Lightmapping: Getting started
I’ll check that out, thanks!
I ended up just scaling everything down so that I wouldn’t be so far from the lights, because I figured it would be worth the decreased memory. So I bake it and I experience some weird issues. All of my streetlights are just duplicates, so they have the same settings. However, some of them aren’t casting light on the road. Some of them are, and then turn off as my camera flies over. Some of them are off and turn on as my camera flies over. Some are always on for as far as I can see them. I have 8 street lights total, all the same, but only two appear to work normally… ah!
I know what the issue is, sort of. Apparently the baked lightmapping isn’t being cast on my road, which is just a textured plane on top of the terrain. The realtime lighting does cast on it though only when render mode is set to important. With the settings set to automatic for lightmapping, I experience the weird issue of light intermittently being cast on the road.
So I suppose the new question is, what might be the reason that the baked lighting isn’t being cast on the road, but only on the terrain next to it?
Is the road marked as static? Objects need to set to static for them to be baked. So your road mesh and possibly for lights. The check box is in the inspector on the top right.
That was the problem! Thanks man!