[Unity 5] Light Probe Objects brighter

Hi,
Not sure if it's a bug or that I've overlooked something here.
Basically, in Unity 5, when the light in the scene is set to "Baked", the light probe objects in the built scene seem to be brighter than the baked object.
To test this out. In a new scene, create a 3D sphere, duplicate it and move the new 1 next to the old one. make one static, and leave the other 1 alone. on the directional light in the scene, make it "Baked". Create an empty object with light probe group in it. Build the scene in the lighting tab. You'll notice that the sphere that's not static seems very flat and bright. If you changed "Baked" to "Realtime" in the light and rebuild the scene, the light probe object would look similar to the baked object.
Any thoughts?


Thanks.

 

I forgot to mention that this is discovered in Unity 5

 

here's a screen capture

 

forgot to mark them.

 

I can confirm. But, I wouldn't expect completely baked and lightprobes to look the same (they are lit with vastly different techniques so there are bound to be differences).

Your results seem borderline okay-ish to me and I was struggling to decide if this is a bug, or the results of being lit by different techniques, So, I tried to recreate to investigate more. What I found is that switching to Gamma makes the problem really worse, so there's definitely a bug there somewhere.



So to re-iterate. The lighting is completely static. All objects, apart for the left sphere and left cube, are set to static. The left sphere and cube have use Light Probes ticked.

 

So I guess this is a bug then? Is there any solution to this for now? Or should I just go back to Unity 4 for now until the next Unity 5 update?
Any suggestions from team?

 

I've got the same issue. Non-static objects seems like twice brighter in comparison with static objects.
Would be good if we could get some comments on probes from Unity.

 

I submitted a bug (case 678167). The QA department told me they were able to reproduce the bug and are sending it to developers to see.

 

Thank you for submitting the report AcidArrow!

 

And there is also an additional problem with light probes: When entering play mode and then exiting, light probes stop working. I have to re-bake lighting again to get them back. This can't be normal behavior?

 

@Polkatuba I'm not getting that behaviour. If you can do it repeatably, maybe a bug report is in order.

 

For me it happens every time. I suppose I have to report it then...

Edit: seems to be happening only when "Continuous baking" is active.

 

I suppose this thread would be better on new Global Illumination forum.

 

Yes, already reported with test scene.

 

In version 5.0.2p2 stills happens. The combination between light baking mode,probes and "Precomputed realtime GI"always give me headache. You never know what is going to happen. Simple Scene: The cube and plane are static, the sphere is dynamic. Only one directional light and probes (no reflection probes in the scene):

1. Light in "Realtime" "Precomputed Realtime GI" ON:


Everything is ok. Static and dynamic objects have dynamic shadows as expected.

2. Light in "Realtime" "Precomputed Realtime GI" OFF:


Everything is burned out. Static and dynamic objects have dynamic shadows as expected.

3. Light in "Mixed" "Precomputed Realtime GI" ON:


Everything is burned out. Specular is lost in the sphere. Static objects don't cast shadows. Well they DO (as seen in the bake view) but they don't appear. This is the bake info:



4. Light in "Mixed" "Precomputed Realtime GI" OFF:


Everything is burned out. Dynamic objects cast dynamic shadows and static objects static shadows. No specular in the sphere

 

Seriously how can we predict a result of lightening of a scene if the same light works completely different for static and dynamic objects in one scene?

 

This is still a problem in 5.1, any word on when this will be fixed?

 

Oh man, I'm a bit of a noob to this stuff. As an artist I come from a Maya background and have been stumbling my way around Unity trying to find a solution. I was sure it was my fault (British guilt complex) so I'm relieved / gutted to find this thread. Relieved that it was not me pressing the wrong button, gutted that it has been around for a while and there isn't much feedback.

What solutions are you finding? Is there a way I can tell the probes to ignore the directional light and light the probes separately with other lights? Not ideal but better than blown out character models. I have to use Gamma and we are deep into unity 5 so changing back to 4 is not really an option at this stage.

 

Unity lightprobes and some of their baked lighting seems to be broken......

 

stoofnie, I just had the same feeling, I though it was my fault; I should have looked a the forums first rather than clicking and so much in my settings. I have lost tons of time as every time I did a test it took 20 minutes to bake the scene.

 

Is there any chance to know planned build with this fix? It would help a lot in our planning.

 

Good to know that it's being addressed. But sad to see that it's taken 6 months to begin to fix a feature which is essential to mobile lighting on some (many?) projects.

4.6 still seems the best option for mobile developers - particularly due to its tried+tested baked lighting solutions. It would be great to see 'mobile friendly' graphics features get some more love, rather than the current focus on 'high end shiny stuff!' (which isn't much use if you're targeting an iPhone 4S).

For example, how about making lightprobes more flexible? - Currently, they can't be additively loaded, and we can't move the probe cloud at runtime - so we can't build procedural levels out of pre-baked tiles.

But things have gone backwards. We've lost the 'bake probes' button, for exmaple. It was extremely useful to be able to adjust lightprobes without doing a full lightmap bake.

 

Seeshh and all this time i thought i was doing something wrong when baking. . .
I hope the fix gonna be rolled in the next patch.

 

I have been testing again on 5.2.0p1 and the issue is still there. It fails just with plane and sphere, it's not a really strange corner case... Please Unity test all cases in linear and gamma, there are not too many.

 

Yeah i'm not seeing this fixed in the changes log

 

Yeah it says fixed in future version, but I'm hoping it doesn't mean 5.3 if they have it fixed now.

 

Is there any estimated time for this, will it be out until 5.3 ?

 

Does this mean that the light probes will be as good as they were in the 4.x series? And will their "brightness" be the same as in the 4.x series, or vastly different?

 

You know what would be nice to have, and would also get around this problem? A "intensity" control for light probes. I'd REALLY like to be able to scale the intensity manually.

 

agreed, or why not just let us edit the individual values ourself through code? Then you could make your own adjustments.

 

You can sort of do that by making your own shaders. Then you could either have different intensities for each material or have a script write to a global shader property that your shaders access.

 

Pretty much what AcidArrow said, you can do that already from shader.

 

Using a shader just doesn't seem like the right solution. I mean, you shouldn't need to write custom shaders for everything in your game. That is very inefficient and difficult to maintain from a logistical perspective. You should be able to just use the tools and have them work properly. And I think an important feature would be to be able to simply tweak the intensity of light probes. That's far better than having to rely on every developer having sufficient shader-writing skill and knowledge to rewrite whatever shader they want to use to get their desired result.

 

If that's the way you feel, you should submit a feature request.

 

I have the same scenario as Bravo_cr at #4: Using light probes removes all specular highlights from a dynamic object and apparently also the normal map effect gets reduced though this might just be a side effect. Is there a solution for this? I have tried all kinds of different settings in the lighting window, it still occurs in 5.3. Also, as long as light probe usage is turned on, the object doesn't receive any real time shadows though it's activated. Any help here is greatly appreciated, thx!

 

Unity 5.3.3f1..... same proble here!
Is possible that all 5.3 versions have the same bug ????
Can't use any Unity 5.3 version for this issue.... please FIX it !

 

Did this ever get officially fixed? Is the workflow just different now? The characters from one of my scenes I upgraded from 4.6 still looks far to bright.

 

See this thread for the main remaining issue with probes:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/un...te-direction-of-the-directional-light.378516/

As lightprobes are still missing L2 coefficients, they're less precise and prone to dark patches opposite to strong lights.

So they're not back to 4.x standard yet, but they're better than they once were.

 

It's because the intent for the current implementation was to get only indirect light (that's what geomerics had in mind I guess, and I also guess it's a bit faster this way).

They don't work super well with high contrast scenarios.