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;
Related
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
The Problem:
I have a pixel-art based project that uses tilemaps and etc. Previously with just the default material Sprites/Default, I have this "Pixel Snap" option:
However, ever since I upgraded to LWRP/URP; and used 2D Lights (my game has a day/night cycle); all of the sprites have to be upgraded to a new Sprite-Lit-Default material which allows my sprites to be affected by the 2D Lights. The only problem I noticed in this new material is that it hasn't got any "Pixel Snap" option:
And after I used this new material, I notice some of my sprites (specifically the ones on the Tilemaps) tear. It's not game breaking and it occurs sometimes, but it's really quite annoying (and let's face it, it looks bad for your game to have that bug).
I haven't noticed this tearing bug on my other sprites (player, trees, obstacles, etc) only particularly on the tilemaps.
What I've Done So Far:
My sprites are set to Point (no filter), and Compression is set to None. On my tile sprites, there are no transparent edges etc. Even if I use Unity's Pixel Perfect Camera, the problem is still there.
Duplicated my tilemaps and offset the other ones to -0.01 or -0.02 on its X axis (so just in case it would tear, the player would still see the same tilemap).
None of these things have fixed the problem so far.
Are there any ways to bypass/fix this issue?
Thanks a lot!
What Solved My Problem
I placed the tilemap sprites on a sprite atlas, set the filter to Point, set the compression to None, left everything else by default, and then clicked "Pack Preview".
I have a simple scene of the interior of a house (less roof). It does not in any way need to look realistic, just to be geometrically correct, therefore the walls and furnishings and fittings are simply constructed from primitive objects - cubes and cylinders etc.
The layout is fine, the problem is the lighting - very black shadows. The scene has the standard single directional light source.
What I need to do is provide overall diffuse lighting - equivalent to an overcast day.
I should point out that I am pretty much a novice on all this - lighting, shaders etc, though I have been reading a lot.
From what I read it appears that this is controlled by shaders, shaders being attached to materials, materials being applied to the objects. However, it doesn't seem to make much sense to me. Surely, a shader, if part of the object by virtue of being attached to the material, can only deal with how light might be reflected off the surface - but the light has to get there first.
Therefore, there must be a way of providing an overall diffuse light in the first place?
Or have I got this completely wrong? How does one get rid of the blackness on the non-illuminated side of an object? So far the only way I have found is to make the surface emit light, ie glow a bit, which surely must not be right.
Your general understanding of how this all works is correct. One way to look at it object request rendering, looks up the material, the material binds shader to a set of parameters. The shader then gets executed, once per light in the scene that affects it (this is simplyfying things but we'll get to that in a bit). This is why lights are expensive (in forward rendering that is), until optimizations start to kick in, this means rendering the scene n times.
So yes, you could just add a constatnt factor in the shader, to achieve the effect of 'ambient' or 'diffuse' lighting. But that shader, in order to support all the features like reflectivity etc, would have to be crazy complicated.
Fortunately, with unity we also get a middle layer called Standard Shader, which does pretty much all of the math underneath, and releases you from the necessity for writing shader code.
For a gentle, diffused look, you definitely want to look at baked Indirect Illumination features of Unity, maybe even lit everything with area lights only.
Its probably also a good idea to looki into light probe groups. They work with spherical harmonics, encoding only the low frequency components of the lighting data, effectively only using slow changing factors like general direction of the light.
Finaly look into reflection probes (and skyboxes while at it), theres few good free HDR probes available that will emit light into your scene (when baking lightmaps and baking lightprobes), enabling surprising realism, compared to default unity skybox.
If you don't want harsh directional light, just disable it (although it's often useful to know what is your strongest light source in your sene - even if its a skybox with some clouds, i would probably keep a scene light just to know faster if anything goes wrong
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.
I placed a light in my scene.
It is lighting the ground when i'm facing that light but when I turn the opposite direction, the light on the ground vanishes.
I think this might be some Unity's default behaviour.
Is there a way I can solve this issue?
Unity uses frustum culling to save performance, so it only draws items that are within the camera's viewing area. As a result of this, the particles behind you are not drawn, and any lights attached to them aren't either.
Scene-crucial lights aren't normally attached to particles, so it's normally not a concern if they're hidden along with their particles.
For conventional lights (not attached to particles), Unity should render the light as long as it affects objects within the camera frustum. If you use a conventional light, you should see better results.
Looks like you may have to disable occlusion culling. Unity3D Manual