Renderer is using distant light probe nodes instead of those nearby

Unity Engine
1

I’m not sure what’s causing this, but some of the renderers in my scene are using some really weird light probes. My expectation is that they should be using the nearest probes to determine their color, but these objects are using probes that are dozens of meters away, despite there being many closer nodes. Here’s an example of one object selected. You can see the probe lines are really far from the selection:

5376060--544359--upload_2020-1-15_22-12-11.png
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There are plenty of closer nodes for it to choose from:

5376060--544362--upload_2020-1-15_22-14-23.png
5376060--544362--upload_2020-1-15_22-14-23.png903×603 604 KB

Why would it be going off to weird locations to find probes instead of using the probes nearby? Lighting is baked, and if I move the object through the center of the grid of probes, it seems to choose the nearby probes. But it seems the object wants to pick probes on each side of it, instead of the closest nodes? How do you address this?

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2

I’m guessing the issue is that probes need to surround the renderers. I typically put probes a bit away from walls, because I thought I was supposed to. But in this case, if I add probes directly in the surface of the object (so the probe gizmo sphere is half embedded in the surface, then three nearby probes are chosen instead of far away probes.

I guess this means I should be embedding probes in the walls?

3

The way probe are applied is that it find the volume in which the object is, bound by 4 light probe forming the vertex of a tetrahedron, within that volume, it pick the light probe then interpolate them, it’s always using light probe .

So what you see is the edge of that volume, the volume is constructed automatically and link all light probe based on closeness, if some of these tetrahedron falls into empty or forbidden space, you will have weird result, because it will pick light probe as vertex that belong to vastly different space.

Basically you want to ensure that everywhere the character go is only enclosed by legal tetrahedron, so one way to do that is to put tetrahedron close to surface, effectively approximating the space where the object will move. Just don’t let the object enter illegal tetrahedron.

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4

Thanks. Looks like I’ll need to make sure I put probes right on the walls/floors/ceilings in some cases. In the example above, the dynamic object is a moving platform that extends from the wall, which seems a bit tricky, since I can’t put probes behind the wall, or they won’t receive light. So I’ll need to carefully place the probes on the wall itself. That does seem to work.