My whole scene's lighting is messed up beyond my comprehension

Alright, so I consider myself fairly competent with UE4, and I figured Unity 5 wouldn't be that much harder to comprehend.

Boy, was I wrong. I cannot, for the life me, get something to work easily. Especially in the lighting department.

For example, in this image, you can see the scene which I have setup. I tried to get neon light tubes, but apparently that won't work simply. They emit light only from a corner, as circled by the blue pen, while the material is flat white.

Next issue: the pillar. For some strange reason, he decided to have some messed up shadows, which makes no sense to me considering the fact that the other pillar is perfect.

Next issue: baking the lighting bakes artifacts all over the lightmaps (my meshes are lightmapped properly, no overlapping faces), so I have to put every light on Dynamic, which means that a proper baking is out of the question, unless I figure out what is going on (which I doubt will happen). That means that I cannot have AO.

Next issue: The Flamingo text's mesh has an emissive material on it, the same as the neon light tubes, however, he decides that he won't emit light.





If someone could help me, that would be greatly appreciated.

 

Which version are you using? Lighting is notoriously buggy (read: bad/inconsistent/cumbersome) since 5.0 dropped but has been progressively getting more and more stable. Some versions are really buggy and difficult to get 'simple' things to work properly. The latest beta version has some good fixes.

Just as a suggestion I would go through the whole lighting tutorial as that is going to shed a lot of light (lel) on how things work, why they might break, what is required on your end to get good results, how emissive materials work, what flagging as static changes, how the rendering path affects lighting, etc...

 

@LaneFox, thanks for the answer.

I am using 5.3.5f1. The thing is, my emissive works half the time. If I take the material on the neon light tubes and place it on a wall, for example, it's going to emit light perfectly. Every mesh in my scene is on Static, and my whole lighting is set to realtime (if I set to "Baked", I will need to bake artifacts on my lightmaps).

On this picture, I have set the neon tubes' material to the wall's windows and it works almost flawlessly. (The shading on the lower part of the pillars doesn't make sense).

 

Another example of messed up emissives.

You can clearly see that the green is emissive. However, nothing appears when I go in GI view - Emissive.





However, it works fine on another object.

 

Just increase the resolution. The texels aren't small enough to pick up anything.

And what GI are you expecting from tiny green circuitry?

 

Thanks for the answer!

To be honest, I didn't expect much GI, I just wanted to be able to see it in the Emissive view, to make sure it was really emitting something.

But your answer clears some things up, thanks!

 

You can use new post processing stack bloom to make halo around emissive materials.
Or Kino bloom for mobile devices (Kino bloom is same effect in post processing stack bloom )

About light mapping, if your lightmaps doesn't had good quality on area lights or emissive materials, just try higher scales in transform component. It makes better lightmap resolution and longer bake time.