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Light Probes Questions/Feedback

Discussion in 'Developer Preview Archive' started by AcidArrow, Dec 22, 2011.

  1. Zomby138

    Zomby138

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2009
    Posts:
    659
    I use a similar thing to that to get some specularity onto my environmental meshes. I was hopeing I wouldn't need to anymore when RNMs came out, but they are only single lightmap, so I can't really use them :\
     
  2. Reanimate_L

    Reanimate_L

    Joined:
    Oct 10, 2009
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    2,788
    Btw is it possible to toggle the display of the probe tesselation lines on the scene view? it really slowing down the scene view especially when we editing the lightprobe and there is a lot of lightprobe in the scene.
     
  3. jackg

    jackg

    Joined:
    Jun 30, 2011
    Posts:
    12
    Do light probes need to be attached to geometry or can they be a game object of their own, as mine are are not showing up in the Lightmapping - Light Probes part of Unity
     
  4. Tim-C

    Tim-C

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Feb 6, 2010
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    2,221
    Spent some time making this faster over that last few days. Performance will be much better in the next release of Unity.
     
  5. Tim-C

    Tim-C

    Unity Technologies

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    Feb 6, 2010
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    Check out the documentation :) The basic overview is that you add a LightProbeGroup to a game object (any game object) then place some probes. If you rotate and move the game object they are attached too they will move relative to that object also. When you do a bake, all the probes that have been placed in these groups get collected and passed to beast. The 'result' probes show up in the lightmapping tab, these are immutable and can not be edited directly.
     
  6. jackg

    jackg

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    Jun 30, 2011
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    12
    Thanks stramit. I was a bit unsure due to the fact that in the lightmapping tool it had an option to link to the lightprobes but I couldn't drop them in, I guess it is for external prefabs that are light probe groups
     
  7. Reanimate_L

    Reanimate_L

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    Oct 10, 2009
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    2,788
    thanks for the update stramit.
    another question, will it support cubemap generation for the lightprobe in the fuure, so we can generate and use cubemap transition with lightprobe?
     
  8. Kuba

    Kuba

    Moderator

    Joined:
    Jan 13, 2009
    Posts:
    416
    Cubemaps would most likely use a different system. The reason is that the current interpolation takes 4 (or 3 outside of the hull) lightprobes to get the interpolated probe on the CPU. It is not feasible to sample 4 cubemaps in the shader on the GPU (let alone interpolating between 4 cubemaps on the CPU).

    If you want lower frequency data than what is typically stored in a cubemap you can convert a cubemap to spherical harmonics. Then using the existing API you can set the lightprobe coefficients and Unity will interpolate those probes for you.
    More info in chapter 10 of GPU Gems 2: Real-Time Computation of Dynamic Irradiance Environment Maps.