Ever since I switched to the new HDRP system with the new lights, I no longer have access to the Culling Mask setting. This setting usually lets you choose which layers the lights affect. But in the new system, they are absolutely gone.
Have you looked at the documentation?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@12.1/manual/Light-Layers.html
Omg, this is the most convuluted change I have ever seen. Not only do they make us go through some hidden menus to set Light Layer settings (they changed the naming from Culling masks which already confuses people), you have to set the Light Layer PER MESH RENDERER! To give an example, if your object is made up of a hundred objects each representing a part of a model, you have to literally change EVER SINGLE LIGHT SETTING in the inspector for it.
In the legacy way, all we had to do was just choose which object layers to ignore that we already set next to tag for objects. And that propogates down to the children object so no need to go into each renderer.
Is this seriously the new way of doing things?!
The 32 bits of the traditional game object layer gets used for tons of things and on complex Unity projects people can easily run out of them. There’s a general effort in Unity to untangle the shared game object layer usage and use feature-specific layers instead.
Rendering layers also have the fundamental difference that they’re not exclusive. While a game object can only be on a single layer, a renderer can be on any number of rendering layers.
The UX could definitely be improved but that’s maybe something that will only happen after the renderer pipelines have been merged. But you could easily create an editor menu command that selects all child renderers and then multi-edit their rendering masks in one go. Or create some scripts that applies the rendering mask based on the game object’s layer.
That’s an unfortunate thing to hear. Although I’m sure this has some time saving qualities going forward like the input system, I’m wondering if I should just revert back to the legacy lighting system since this may be too much of a big design change. For now, I’ll work with it by not touching light levels yet so I can keep developing. I’ll consider this answered.