Hi, I’m new with Unity and am super frustrated with lighting. I’ve heard Unreal is a lot more like every 3D application out there and I’m curious if anyone has any opinions. I can’t get basic Unity lighting working despite many years of 3D animation experience, so I’m thinking it’s not really built for naturalistic rendering. I don’t mean perfect realism, I mean, “I should see a point light here” without 12 hours of troubleshooting.
Please someone prove me wrong and show me the light (literally) because I’ve wasted thousands of dollars and my entire summer otherwise.
spent time leaning, including a class about C# programming for Unity – I was expecting C# to be the challenging part, not getting a basic point light to also be a point light when running in an app. I’ll be taking an Unreal course too, but seriously this lighting situation has almost convinced me already
Wait, so your opinion is that I should make my own opinion, and that I shouldn’t ask others – and I just proclaimed that Unity appears to have a terrible lighting? I was expecting an intellectual conversation about 3D development. I must be in the wrong place.
You expected an intellectual discussion when all you did was open with a rant?
And we’ve had the Unreal vs Unity discussion a million times here. The threads all get closed because the consensus amounts to “it really depends on how you want to develop” which means you have to try them yourself.
I count it among the easiest parts. Hope you didn’t drop the thousands just on getting taught C#.
I would approach trouble shooting this in this way:
assume “it can’t ba that hard”
assume you did something wrong
start from scratch in a new project, new scene, only use default cubes as meshes (I have a hunch there’s something wrong with your meshes), don’t touch settings you don’t understand and absolutely need to change (mark all as static, change point light shadow type to “soft shadows” and mode to “baked”, and instead of enlighten use whatever other light baker is available and working)
then once you have that looking as expected, start approaching the settings and setup of your broken scene one by one, to see where it all starts falling apart. start with your meshes, I believe there might be issues with missing lightmap UVs or similar
I never seriously used baked lighting, so I can’t give you more help. There are some “gotchas” for sure, but it’s not nearly as bad to warrant an engine change over it imho.
Use what you need. Going online and arguing, defending your choice, or attacking other’s choices is something that only useless people do. It’s not allowed here because it is pointless.
General ranting is not allowed either. If you have a specific question post it accurately and politely in the correct forum.