Shadows too dark, not using baked lighting

Unity Engine
1

Hello!

So I’ve got a more-or-less partially functional game and I’d like to get into the lighting graphics of it. Please note I’m doing it for Android so performance is quite an issue. Here’s a screenshot:

1920×1080 196 KB

As you can see, my only light is set to baked. So I’ve got 2 questions:
1: Why are my UFO and asteroid lit at all if I haven’t baked any lighting?
2: How can I make the shadows not as dark?

So sorry if this is a stupid question, I’m not new to Unity but these lights are currently bugging me out pretty badly.

THANK YOU!

2

Spend some time on the lighting tab. :slight_smile: (maybe it’s the ambient settings? could be a number of things)

3

The lighting tab does have a lot of settings, however changing the ambient light intensity does nothing. I noticed that if I disable my only light, everything goes dark. However I can’t understand why it is lighting my objects even when it is set to “baked”, and I’ve cleared all the bake data.

4

If confused, here’s what I mean:

1932×2184 656 KB

So the directional light that’s set to BAKED works as if it is set to real-time… so confused!

5

I believe even if you haven’t baked the scene, it’s applying precompute GI to everything in order to preview the baked GI.

6

Here’s my lighting settings:

As you see the precomputed GI is off. I have Baked GI on but there are no lightmaps baked.

7

What do you want to happen?

8

I’d like my baked light to stop acting like a realtime light. Basically I want to know why my objects are still lit when I activate a baked light with no baked lightmaps. Also I’d like to make the shadows not as dark.

P.S. Sorry for being such a pain with these lights :frowning:

9

Well, bake your lighting then.

10

Ah, I have to BAKE the lighting first and then the light will work. However I’ve set my light to no shadows yet it still bakes very dark shadows. Is there a way to decrease the shadow intensity with the directional light set to no shadows? The reason I’m not happy with the shadows is because when I fly behind a planet, it gets pitch dark and is almost impossible to see the plane.

11

That’s not shadows, that’s just polygons that face away from the light. Add some ambient lighting.

1 Like
12

Thank you so much! The planet is still a bit too dark on the dark end, but at least I can now see my UFO :smile: