Thanks for reading this. I need some help with an issue.
I’ve been trying to get light-probes to work. The lightmaps etc. all work fine in my scene but the light-probes don’t seem to adopt the right values from the lightmap. I’ve tried everything for different spacing between the probes to adjusting lights, baking the probes separately etc. They seem to adopt some color information but they’re pretty much all white / too bright, even in darker areas and shadows on the lightmap.
Any idea what could cause this? Attached comes a screenshot.
At first I thought this was normal but when I took a good look at the Shadow Gun demo scene I noticed the dark and bright differences on the probes.
I also couldn’t find a really good tutorial on how to set up lightprobes in the first place.
Hey MissedIsland,
It seems as if the base textures and main colors (both of which form albedo) on your materials are quite dark. In such a case one tends to increase light intensity to make the scene be brighter. If the intensity of the light that is gathered at the light probe position is bigger than 1 – then when shown on the sphere visualising the light probe it clamps to white, hence you can’t see any lighting change across the surface of the sphere.
To quickly figure out whether this is the case place a sphere game object in your scene and check the Use Lightprobes checkbox on the Renderer component. Then create a new material and drag it onto the sphere and change the brightness of the main color on that material until some detail in the lighting shows up.
A proper solution would be to keep your albedo (textures, main colors) as bright as possible as that allows the lighting to be in a more reasonable range (usually within 0-1) which is good for light probe visualisation, but also for lightmap encoding.
If this is not the case though, you can create a new scene with a plane, a sphere and a directional light, add some light probes there, bake and make the sphere use light probes.You should be able to figure it out by tweaking the light intensity and rebaking, and changing the main color on sphere’s material.
You’ll find more information about the light probe setup, usage and the difference between the single and the dual lightmap mode in the docs:
Please let us know once you figured it out or if you still have problems.
Useful info! In my case however, the scene’s ambient light somehow got cranked up to full white after the lightmap was baked, hence the white probes… stupid me
One thing you might want to consider is using a light probe region editor. There’s a script available on the Asset Store called “Light Probe Region Tool”. It allows you to set a region for your lightprobes via script. You can control the area and density of the light probes, and make sure everything is lit evenly without going through the tedious process of setting them by hand.
Please remember though that the whole point of using tetrahedrons for the base structure, and not a uniform grid, is that you can make sure you have all the important light-shadow transitions covered and avoid light leaking through walls with a small amount of probes. Using a uniform grid is just not a good idea in most cases.
Actually, the Light Probe Region Tool isn’t restricted to a uniform grid, it’s primary purpose is to quickly populate the probes into an area so you can focus on rapidly adjusting them into the most efficient layout, rather than tediously populating them one at a time.
I am having the same problem with Unity 5. If I set the light to “baked”, the light probe objects become brighter and more flat looking comparing to the baked objects in the scene. If I set the light to “Real Time” the light probe objects match the baked objects.
Is there a setting that I’ve overlooked or is this a bug?
Hey Shoe,
Generally spherical harmonics (so the way lighting information is encoded in light probes) looses some fidelity when used for direct lighting compared to realtime lighting. That said, could you please submit a bug report on it, so we can make sure that what you’re seeing is indeed expected?
I’m experiecing the same issue too. Objects with light probes are way too bright compared to baked objects as seen in this image. All 3 spheres are using the same material (aldebo main color = 1).
I have the same problem because my ambient is white. I need it to be white to achieve art direction, but the characters need darker probes. Why can’t we bake probes only like before anymore? This would allow me to change the ambient color and bake the probes only.
@anon_34550757 Are you using Unity 4 or Unity 5?
I noticed Unity 5 light probes seem to look way too rich in contrast compared to Unity 4 (too bright in the lights, to dark in the shadows).
I also seem to see that light probes in Unity 5 sometimes appear brighter than they should be.
Example: I have a static mesh with a PBR material and a dynamic mesh (with light probes enabled) using the same PBR material. I also have a single directional Light (set to Baked or Mixed) and a Light Probe Group, with the default 4 probes, surrounding the meshes.
If I clear all baked lighting, then everything looks normal (discounting reflections), and the 2 objects display similar lighting to one another. If I bake, then static mesh retains it’s proper lighting (via the baked lightmap), but the dynamic mesh is too bright.
Here are images demonstrating. You can see that all I do is toggle whether the mesh uses lightprobes or the realtime (Mixed mode) directional light. The first images shows the sphere with correct lighting (no probes), and the second image shows the brighter sphere using probes.
I’d like to add to this thread - we are experiencing exactly the same problem where all the light probes are ‘blowing out’ the brightness of the realtime objects. This is definitely a bug!
I’m guessing there has still not been a status change on this?
We are trying to work around it, but not managing to.
What we are currently trying:
Adding the lights ourselves to the probes, as a point light can be seen as a directional light if you simply pre-multiply down the intensity by the falloff. However somewhere, somehow the gamma/linear seems to be causing us issues, and we have as of yet been unable to figure them out.
I’ve reproduced these results, and can validate the OP’s claim.
This means baking is broken in the general case, which is a big deal. This has been logged, but with no official comment, validation, or indication of fixes in 5.1 beta.
What’s most unfortunate, is the official response indicating things are working correctly – they definitely are not. Someone on the rendering team needs to dig into how their SH values are being computed, because they broke in Unity 5.
I’m more than happy to share test scenes illustrating these issues with any support staff.
It is surprising that more than half a year ago, in the early closed beta was normal 0_o
While I expected the incredible experience of Unity 5. But much time has passed, and we still can not make upgrade to U5, because they lose all the beautiful and high performance light models.
