Problem with scene on windows

Unity Engine
1

Hello

I have this really odd problem when i export my level to pc.

The scene looks identical to that on the mac, however all the sky area becomes slow rendered(when you get that jerly pixelated look) as if the graphic card is not keeping up. When i point the camera down to the ground, and look slightly up at the buildings around - i.e. that doesnt have any sky parts visible, the scene renders ok.

Anyone any ideas why this is so? and had problems with the sky area like this

Thanks

Steve

2

Nothing jumps out immediately other than potential hardware/machine specific issues. For example, is that Windows machine using a lower-end video card such that it’s struggling somehow? Do you have an example that we can see/download?

In short, I don’t have an immediate answer but thought it would help to kickstart the conversation a bit.

3

Thanks for the reply

It was actually a simple fix…

I checked my skybox material, and found that at some stage in the project, i had removed the skybox shader, and changed it to diffuse. As there was no skybox present on screen, the graphic card was somehow rendering the background in a variety odd way, hence the sluggish pixelated appearance in the sky area.

I remember why i did this, as i was trying to find out how i could make the sky area darker.

In fact this does lead to a next question rather than reposting. No matter how i setup my lighting in scene - at the moment its a dark medieval street scene with ambient gas lamp lighting, and the ambient setting is set to almost black, yet the sky is still fully illuminated at its source colour. Why doesnt the sky darken too> and without having to adjust the images in an art program, is there a way in unity to do this in accordance with the lighting in the scene.

As a footnote, im to release a unity friendly package medieval city pack containing 27 buildings, music, props and also a character pack this week, once i get my promo screens done. Unity users will be able to download examples, plus free assetts, and discount on the pack also

Steve

4

The skybox shader doesn’t use lighting, and it wouldn’t really make sense to do so in any case. Change the tint color in the skybox material to darken it.

–Eric

5

Thanks for the reply

I disagree here slightly, ambient light should alter if the skybox darkens or not. I altered the tint setting but this just seemed to saturate the colour, rather than darken it. I guess il alter it in photoshop.

Cheers

Steve

6

No, because the ambient light level doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what the skybox looks like…for example, if you have ambient light at .5 for a daylight scene, it’s unlikely you’d want your skybox darkened to 50%. And if you’re using a nighttime skybox with stars and so on, you want it to be 100% brightness even if you have little or no ambient light. It’s pretty trivial to write a script that ties the ambient level to the skybox brightness in some fashion, but how you do it depends on what you want your scene to look like.

Reducing the brightness of the tint definitely darkens the skybox. The built-in shader has a particular method for applying the tint, but if you’d rather have a different ratio, you can make a custom shader off the built-in one that replaces all instances of

SetTexture [_*Tex] { combine texture +- primary, texture * primary }

with

SetTexture [_*Tex] { combine texture * primary, texture * primary }

Where _*Tex is _FrontTex, _BackTex, etc.

–Eric