Object affected by blend probes isn't affected by ambient lighting?

Unity Engine
1

Hello!

For some reason, all my dynamic objects that are using blend probes aren’t affected by ambient lighting. Is this on purpose? If so, why is this done?

Thank you
Josh

EDIT: I think I understand. Ambient lighting and light probes can’t really mix, since ambient lighting is basically fake lighting. Thus, I have to ask: can I somehow know that the object’s shader should be affected by ambient lighting? Aka is outside as opposed to inside? Being able to mark blend probes as interior or exterior would be interesting, although I’m unsure how I’d do that.

Basically, how do people get ambient lighting, aka lighting from the sky, to affect exterior areas when using light probes?

2

Alright, now I see that it uses the skybox during baketime. That’s very useful information, I had no idea skybox could affect baking things. And now I have another problem: these baked objects are no longer affected by skybox changes. I have a dynamic skybox oof.

I always thought you could still have baked mixed global illumination even with dynamic ambient lighting! I’m clearly mistaken. Now I am very unsure of what I am supposed to do.

Josh is lost.

3

Realtime ambient contribution only works when Realtime GI is enabled. If you happen to use baked GI, ambient contribution is going to be baked into lightmaps, and cannot be changed during runtime.

1 Like
4

Alright, that makes sense! It’s interesting that ambient lighting can’t affect lightmaps, since it’s such a simple lighting color. But hey, I don’t know anything about this! XD

Here’s a stupid question: does baking realtime GI result in faster lighting calculations during runtime, when compared to not having any realtime GI?

Thank you!

5

Using realtime GI is going to be more expensive than using realtime direct lighting, as there’s some CPU overhead in Enlighten realtime GI calculations.

1 Like
6

Gotcha! So if I have a dynamically lit world (sky system), the fastest route is to do no baking whatsoever.

7

After looking more into it, I’m very confused if this is true - if I have a largely static scene with dozens of mixed lights, and bake it with Realtime GI, this is somehow slower than merely doing no baking at all and making the lights realtime? Note that this scene also contains dynamic objects, hence the mixed lights as opposed to entirely baked