I'm building a virtual exhibition platform in unity. There are about 50 stalls and I used a directional light and 124 point lights light up the scene. I didn't use any real time lighting, only baked lighting is used. But at runtime frames get dropped. when I inactivate all pointlights it works smoothly. How can I optimize lights?
You can improve your performance by doing the following,
Add Light Probes, this can minimize the number of point lights in use.
Change Render Mode to Auto, this will reduce the load significantly in your case as there are a lot of point lights in use.
Apply a culling mask, make sure the light affects only the required object in the stall.
Use Fake Shadow instead of using Soft Shadow.
Switch to URP or HDRP.
Alternate way :
Build and bake each stall separately in Blender or Maya. Then add them to unity. This way you don't need to add that many point lights and bake.
124 Point Lights that is a LOT of lights, but you could use Deferred Rending path on your Camera (but if you need VR I'm not sure its supported).. You can set the Point Lights to be Baked, use Baked lighting and light probes instead. Set everything that won't move in your scene to be Static objects (very top right corner box). also remember to go into Rendering -> Lighting and Generate the Lighting and look at the options presented there.
Light probes video
Related
So I am baking Subtractive light in my VR build.
I have the models set to static, generated UV's for all of them and played a lot with the lighting settings.
The problem is that the sigle baked directional light looks too dark and "burnt" after baking.
How can I keep the brightness of the pre-baked scene after baking?
Posting images of before/after baking and settings below:
To increase the brightness of shadow you can change "Intensity" parameter in your directional light settings.
This "burnt" effect looks kinda pixelated so to fix this you could in your lightmapping settings increace lightmap resolution or lightmap size. If it didn't help, you could increase "scale in lightmap" in mesh renderer.
Another option is to create a copy of your directional light so that you have two directional lights in your scene. Then assign one light mode to 'Realtime' and adjust the intensity to get the scene brightness looking the way you want and assign the other light mode to 'Baked' and change the intensity to get the baked shadows looking better.
Baked light should always be the same (or better) brightness under direct lighting conditions.
There can be a multitude of issues in your scene, and why it's giving you this effect.
Please check the following in this order:
Does your models have proper UV maps
Does your models have enough scale in lightmap (small lightmaps can create faulty shadow effects)
Does your scene has enough reflection probes for indirect lighting (not enough light from the shadowed side can "shadow" the lit side.
Do you have ambient occlusion enabled? Maybe you need to fiddle with the values there.
From experience "Baked Indirect" gives better results than "Subtractive"
Are your settings in URP or HRDP or LRP are correct?
Is your "Sun" the right brightness?
What you should expect with "good settings"
Example lighting settings that the result above were achieved:
Change Direct Samples to 32, Indirect samples to 512, Environment size to 256, and change lightmap size from 512 to 1040. Make sure also that any emission materials are changed from Realtime to Baked along with of course having such objects set to static. That should take care of some of the lighting and illumination issues. Also double check that these materials are all checked for GPU instancing.
Since you are using Directional Light, Try adding a Bakery Skylight into your scene. That fixed the burnt shadows problem for me after baking. Shadows are more lighter now.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to light up large area(s) of sprites in Unity 2D. My previous knowledge on Unity's lighting is zero.
I first tried using a large amount of point lights and using the "Sprites/Diffuse" material, but about only five would actually render at a time, so I guess there's a limit on that.
Then I tried putting in an area light. That didn't do anything, so that's when I started doing research about baked lighting on sprites (and baked lighting in general). I found stuff like this but I couldn't get it to work either because it's outdated or because I don't know what I'm doing. Other answers I've come across seem to assume that the reader knows anything about lighting in Unity in the first place which, to be honest, I don't. Unity's documentation website had some information on it, but no tutorials that go into how to set up baked lighting.
I've tried a bunch of different combinations of materials (like using the "Standard" shader for the sprites instead of "Sprites/Diffuse", emission, ect.) and I enabled "Baked Global Illumination" in Lighting>Settings.
If baked lighting isn't possible on sprites (or isn't worth the trouble), what are the alternatives?
Edit: I made sure not to have the lights pointing the wrong direction, and I do realise that Unity2D is just like painting onto a piece of paper in Unity3D. I was able to get point lights to work, but only a few at a time. I don't need to do the entire screen at once, I need to do a large specific area at once.
some tips...
working with sprites your in 2d... when you add a light, switch to 3d mode, and rotate to make sure your light is pointed at your objects, and oriented so as not to be on the same plane, or level with them, as this will cast all the light behind them.
if your trying to light up everything on the screen(in camera) attach an area light to the camera at the cameras position, point it where the camera points, and then in the inspector on the right, you can change its variables. intensity, range, width, height etc.
Emissive Texture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa6kW5HhRd4
For some reason, I never even thought about going into the asset store. I found this for free, and it looks like it will work: Light2D.
UPDATE: As #BenHayward suspected, this is a bug. <link>
I have a very simple setup of cubes on a plane comprising a grid of quads. A directional light is shining down at the scene at an angle, producing a set of shadows from the cubes onto the quads.
Now I'm trying to produce an explosion effect with Unity's particle system, but when I add a point light to the particle system it causes all the directional-lighting shadows to disappear, whether they're in line of sight of the particle or not.
The shadows reappear when the particle is destroyed. Replicating the particle effect with pure C# doesn't cause any problems.
(Oh, and obviously I'm using the deferred rendering path.)
Any ideas? This is driving me off the wall.
[EDIT: I should have mentioned that the point light added to the particle system is set to cast shadows. The Unity standard particle pack has shadow-casting disabled by default. They too cause the problem when I turn the shadow-casting on.]
Based on the project that you linked to, it seems as though the particle system is causing the shadow cast from the directional light to flicker on and off quickly. I suspect this is a bug, since if it were intended behaviour, I wouldn't expect it to flicker in this manner.
In cases where this is not a bug, the problem can be caused by a couple of issues:
You can only have a certain number of dynamic (shadow casting) lights in your scene which are seen by the camera frustum. By default, this number is quite low (I think it's 4). You can increase this number by going to Edit > Project Settings > Quality. Set the Pixel Light count higher from its default value. You will need to increase this value to be greater than the total number of lights in your effect. Higher values will allow more lights to be rendered on the screen, but this reduces performance.
It depends on the shaders which you are using to receive the shadows. Some shaders will only render shadows for one directional light. The light which is used isn't necessarily too easy to determine. If you are using the standard Unity shader this shouldn't be a problem. But if you are using a mobile compatible surface shader or something you've written yourself then this could be the cause of the problem.
Also, for an explosion, I'd recommend using just one single point light (not lights attached to each particle), as this is all that is required. Any more lights would result in considerable performance impact on the GPU especially if there are more than one explosion in the scene at any one time.
I recreated the scene as you described, i can't recreate your issue.
i mostly followed this tutorial, and added a few cubes in a plane:
https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/graphics/adding-lighting-particles
I will need a screenshot of your lights componnents, both the directional and the point light, the particles, and the cubes (mostly the material); I cannot comment because i dont have enough reputation yet, so i'll delete this once you add the screenshots;
How do I create this lighting effect in HaxeFlixel or Unity ?
I will tell you how it was created in this specific case. This question is very broad and there are very many ways to create lighting effects in both Unity and HaxeFlixel.
The image is of the game Beneath the City by Deepnight, accessible on his website. The game uses haxe although not with HaxeFlixel. It's deepnight's personal engine that works with the flash target. The source code is available here. The class where lighting takes place is in src/Level.hx and more specifically in the renderLights method. From what I gather, a light layer is layered above the sprites of the level. This layer (or bitmap data) has lights drawn as rectangles on it. This layer is then blurred, so that the lights don't appear as solid rectangles, but as faded blurs of spreading light. This takes place with flash blur filters. Blend modes are used to make the light Add in luminosity. A dark mask is then layered above the blur layer, presumably to prevent light in certain locations, such as in the fog of the game. (?). This all takes place between lines 208 and 248.
This game truly does have gorgous visuals, but the lighting goes beyond the initial blurred lights. Particles float around in the game that really add to the lightings aesthetic.
This is all how he does it though. How you do it is up to you. For HaxeFlixel, I would first consider alternatives such as this geometric lighting or this method of applying lighting to scenes, which looks closer to screenshot or even a very simple circle based lighting alternative. Searching Unity 2D lighting brings up plenty of options.
You've got plenty of options on how to approach the issue. I didn't answer this with a direct tutorial because the question isn't at the code level.
I'm generating a dungeon out of prefabs which means I design a room, save it in the resource folder and instantiate it at a random position with a random rotation while the game is running.
The problem I have is the lighting.
Because of the above mentioned generation process it has to be dynamic but it doesn't seem to work. Below you can see the comparison between a baked and realtime rendered room:
Baked (I also don't know where these strange lighting borders (on the walls), which are looking like someone painted the light with watercolors are coming from):
Realtime:
As you can see, the realtime room doesn't seem to reflect light in any way.
These are my lighting settings:
And this is my 'sun':
What am I doing wrong?
Your lighting settings have Ambient Light set to 0- with realtime lighting, this means nothing that can directly see the source of a light will be lit at all. The screenshot with baked lighting looks different because it has a baked lightmap.
If you're trying to get the real-time lighting to look exactly like the baked, soyy, but Unity refuses to bake lightmaps at runtime. The closest you can probably get is by setting your Ambient Light to a color and its intensity above zero. Playing around with Light Probes probably won't be much good, since you need to light an entire room in a vacuum.
An alternate solution, depending on how well you know Unity, would be to Frankenstein together different scenes, which is mentioned briefly in Unity's Intro to Global Illumination, though I can't find it anywhere else.
Relevant links:
Baked Lightmaps: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GIIntro.html
Light Probes: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LightProbes.html
Ambient Light: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GlobalIllumination.html