Trying to boost emissive light of an object

Unity Engine
1

Hi there,

I’m new to GI in Unity 5 so if someone could help me out with this it’d be great!
I’m trying to boost the emissive effect of an object without loosing it’s original colour.

If I overdrive the values on this materials ‘emission’ slot I get a boosted effect on the scene but the actual material colour changes to something that doesn’t look so good. Is there some way to control the effect independently?

Any ideas?

Thanks
Pete

2

I’d also like to know. There’s a Indirect Intensity and Bounce Boost value in the General GI settings of Lighting but that is capped. It can help in your case but it wasn’t enough for me.

Some seperate method to not oversaturate the basic material would be great. Precisely, a method where you can turn up the emissive value without actually changing the base material would be great.

Maybe a seperate shader works. I looked into it a little but haven’t really figured it out yet.

3

Is there a way to make an object visible to the GI system but not the camera? I was thinking maybe you could hack an object that does the job but is never visible in the scene??

4

The only way I know of is to use a cutout shader.

5

Would the cutout shader be ignored by the GI system? (but make the object appear invisible)

6

Ahh cool! I tested that out and it seems to work :smile:

I had to scale that slightly larger than the original object to get it to work but this is definitely handy to know!

Thanks for that,
Pete

7

No problem. I found it out myself, but I think there should be a proper way to do this. This is kind of a smelly hack. It’s not bad on performance though.

8

Implement a custom meta pass for your emissive objects. Pass in whatever emission value you like to its fragment shader. Object’s material emission is now decoupled from object’s emission during GI calculation, allowing you to adjust both independently.

note: Attached shader is a few months old and the standard shaders it’s based on may be out of date.

2532280–175757–gi_emission.7z (6.21 KB)

1 Like
9

Just would like to add to this, the gi_emission shader works but this is the version for Unity 5.6. Took me a while to realize it’s referencing an older unity. Hope it helps

3047246–228535–GI.zip (8.5 KB)