Hi all,
Apologies if this is in the wrong section.
I am looking to light an area that’s rather large, an area of 255 x 150 x 100 units.
I’m using the HDRP, I’ve created my prototype and now I want to light it up.
The directional light looks great… although this area is indoors, so I will aim to play with the directional light a bit for some ambience but ultimately I’m going to need some beefy spotlights/area lights to do the rest. The level is a large room where the player is miniature, so I will also need to simulate lighting from lamps, windows etc, but all on a scale of 50x more than a regular sized room.
Is this possible? I’m placing lights down and nothing is showing up. The directional light works nicely, but as I say this is an indoor environment where I will need other sources. Any others I am placing are showing the tiniest fraction of light even after upping the range and intensity. The material shader is HDRP-Lit.
Perhaps there is another technique I should be using for such a large space? This is a new style of project for me so I am unsure if I am doing something abhorrently wrong.
EDIT:
To anyone in the future finding this.
There is an option to change the light intensity units to EV-100, I know nothing about the technicalities of this, so unknown if there are drawbacks, performance issues etc, only that they’re very powerful compared to Lumens and I am now able to light this huge area as if it were a normal size room.
I was also able to achieve this with an EV-100 intensity emission texture.
Thanks for any and all help.
HDRP lighting is physically based, so for a space that big not even stadium-grade lighting would be enough. You could get by with figuring out what multiplier the light intensities would need to account for the scale but I’m not sure it will work/look right.
I would personally try as much as possible to stick to real world size values because it would make both lighting and physics straightforward (Unity’s implementations are based on 1 unit equal to 1 meter).
I don’t know what reasons you would have to not go this way even for a miniature game but whatever they are they’re probably easier to find workarounds for than the hacks you’d need for lighting and physics.
Ok thanks for the insight.
The game itself is akin to Micro machines, Grounded etc, so it was a scale-choice of either
- Huge world, normal people or
- Normal world, tiny people
Had a very brief play with tiny people but they were beyond buggy and impractical.
What other options are out there then? Surely Unity has the capability to light large areas? What about cities, and terrain landscapes??
Or perhaps there are camera tricks like the Skybox projection that Source uses?
I don’t need “realistic” physics on the large scale, and obviously the physics for the player are fine as the players scale is the default ~2 units, so it’s just a lighting blocker at the minute.
Thanks for your time!
Give scaling a quick go then, get/make a sample scene in regular size (could use the HDRP sample one), scale it up and see if you can get the lighting to match. I think (needs to be verified) that for example one 1000 lumen light in regular scale would need to be x100 if the scene is scaled x10 (so 100000 lm).
Clicked on Lumens to see the other units on offer and found EV-100, this seems to be the answer to my problems! Didn’t know you could change the units. The lumens equivalent was 3.77394e+08 so that’s… not really usable haha, EV100 seems perfect for now, although I’m sure I’ll run into more problems down the line.
Thanks!