Point Lights and Occlusion Culling

Unity Engine
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1

The same issue as this old thread, amazingly still exists in Unity 2019.2.21f1 (64-bit).
Unity 5.2.1p2: Realtime lights not working - Occlusion Problem page-3#post-5920154

Pretty frustrating as I’m already working around other lighting limitations and then hit this issue, which is pretty much a brick wall for what I’m trying to do right now.

I was using a mixed lighting setup to get specular, as Unity does not give that baked and the scene looks flat otherwise. Unfortunately the performance cost was just too high, so I’ve gone 100% baked for now. However now of course the scene looks pretty dull, even with reflection probes and light-probes setup correctly.

So the idea - to have a dynamic point light follow the player (at a fixed distance / interval, so not always moving), with a low light emission, just enough to give specular in the local area to the player. For what I’m trying to do the concept works great, however due to the bug above, Unity culls the light depending on what angle you look at certain meshes.

Disabling occlusion culling on the camera, the issue immediately goes away, however then my scene is useless anyway, as I then have no culling and tris / verts go up exponentially.

I’ve just spent the last 4 hours, trying every light setting and trick in the book to get around the issue, with no luck at all. So it’s pretty much dead in the water right now. Posting this in the hope that someone at Unity actually notices and picks up on the issue.

FWIW - right now trying to launch my project, so don’t have time to spend creating a repro for such a simple case, that should have been fixed long ago.

// Wildstyle

2

Spent more time working on my materials and lighting setup today - do have things in a fairly decent place now. Although it would still be nice to have the option of using real-time points with mixed lighting setup, without the occlusion culling bug.

// Wildstyle

3

I too got frustrated by this long standing bug in occlusion culling and mixed point lights. Fortunately, in my case, we didn’t absolutely need occlusion culling. S/W culling did a good enough job.

1 Like
4

Hello, this looks like a realtime lighting issue, which unfortunately is not really relevant to this forum. We mostly deal with GI and baked solutions here.
Can you tell us which rendering pipeline (Legacy, URP, HDRP) you are using in your project so we can redirect you to the appropriate forum please ?

Cheers

5

A possible fix is a flag “Don’t cull any lights”. I can do my own light culling.

The details are:

  1. Legacy render pipeline
  2. Mixed point lights
  3. Occlusion culling
  4. 2019.3
    Which Unity department / forum does this belong to?
1 Like
6

I’m running the same setup as @rmon222 on Unity 2019.2.21f1 - strange that the issue does no belong in this forum.

// Wildstyle

7

Hey all, I moved the thread to the General Graphics subforum, as it fits better here. Poked the Graphics Foundation team to take a look.

1 Like
8

Hey guys

@rmon222 @WildStyle69

Same issue for me on unity 2019.4.13 LTS with a realtime light and legacy render pipeline. Depending on the angle i’m looking at a wall for exemple, the light is culled. I’m in VR

One of you ever found a solution ?

@Kuba : is this a normal behavior ?

Small exemple :

2 Likes
9

Same problem in Unity 2018.2.21f in VR. And this is very annoying … Have you found how to fix the problem?

1 Like
10

I’m just frustrated by how the Unity engine works with real light. And I think no one cares about that on the Unity team. I lose real light in all scenes - depending on the turn of the head. I have been buying a subscription for many years. And I can say the last stable version of Unity was 4. No words, just anger …

And the only solution for me is to disable Occlusion at all levels …

11

I completely agree with you.

12

This is unbelievable. Getting this issue on 2019.1.8f1, also using VR (it seems the bug gets triggered by camera angles that are more easily achieved in VR). I thought I was doing something wrong, I would have never guessed this was a bug reported as early as 2015.

There surely must be a solution because “turning off occlussion culling” is not acceptable.

1 Like
13

Small update for those of you suffering with this bug: adjusting the “boundingSphereOverride” of the lights seems to affect the behaviour of the bug. For me it didn’t fix it, as setting too small of a radius makes it work for the vr player but screws the light for any camera further than the radius. Still, worth a look I guess.

14

LOL, this bug exists in the version 2020 of unity…what a shame… unity team pls fix this annoying bug. it exists since 2014…

1 Like
15

All versions I tried after 2017.4.29 have this error, it’s annoying. I have to update the VR applications, but the problem persists. Has anyone found any solution?

16

Still dealing with this in 2020.2.2f1. I would prefer to be able to use Occlusion. just sayin’

1 Like
17

@ Team will you ever fix this problem? It is so annoying for VR devs.

3 Likes
18

Unity3d 2021.1.17f HDRP

My Area Rectangular light started to flicker at some angles.

Be it baked occlusion culling or not baked, behavior is the same.

I disable Occlussion Culling on my Camera, and still no changes.

I try to set boundingSphereOverride to bigger and set useBoundingSphereOverride = true but it resets to previous value automatically.

I’M SO ANGRY !!!

Now I would like to completely disable any kind of culling for lights and do it myself.
But let me guess I cannot do it ?

19

Hello!

We are started using real time vertex lighting and we are facing light culling issue that point toward Occlusion bug or missing feature. Meshes are popping up and not lighting up from dark-black. Very annoying…

20

This is still an issue in unity 2021.2.6f1.
Urp, per pixel or per vertex doesnt matter

We also use the cinemachine and a thirdparty controller. The visible space below the player is were the issue is most apparent.

(No its not a max. lights issue, also it is not occlusion data related (tested when cleared))