Light emission as light source

Unity Engine
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I want to light my world primarly through glowing trees, plants, rocks etc.
Also my weapon should be able to light the environment.

It should have an effect like this:
Imgur
Imgur

How it looks currently:
Imgur
Imgur

I tried increasing the emission intensity, baked the light and turned it back down. That way I had kind of a lighting effect.
But I’m searching for a solution, how I can light up a room or objects around (if possible in runtime) with emission. Adding lights doesnt work because of the limitations of light effects per pixel and would be way too recource intensive.

Is there any way, how I can:

  1. Light up a room / light up objects around it
  2. Object has the glowing effect of the emission
  3. Object isn’t bright as a flashlight, but only a bit bright, like in the first pictures I linked.

I don’t care if I need HDRP or a hard to learn something. The work I would have to put in to make it work is secondary.
Thanks in advance!

2

you should look into using light probes!

1 Like
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That’s difficult. The sole reason why point/directional/spot lights exist in game engines is because it’s not feasible to light a world in real-time with just emissive surfaces. This works only if you use (real-time) path tracing or baked lighting.

You can get the glow by enabling the bloom post-processing effect, but the emissive surfaces won’t shine any light on other surfaces.

You can use light probes, like Pookshank said, but those are baked too. So everything that glows would have to be static.

There are some solutions for dynamic GI like screen-space GI, voxel based GI (e.g. VXGI) or raytraced GI (e.g. RTXGI) but they all have limitations.

Unity has support for realtime lightmaps (Enlighten) but it only allows the light sources to be dynamic - the geometry still needs to be static. It’s also deprecated. HDRP has support for SSGI. There is also a free implementation of voxel cone tracing on github called SEGI.

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I’ll have a look into those methods! Thanks guys, I appreciate it.:slight_smile:

2 Likes
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By the way, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is doing exactly that (jump to minute 6:32):