Billboard trees unaffected by scene lighting (always fully lit)

Why are my billboard trees so much brighter than the 3d trees? This is a night time scene. Here are some screenshots and settings. When using the editor lighting (game lighting turned off) the trees look fine (but much brighter than they should be since they are daytime lit instead of nighttime lit). When using my game lighting the 3d trees look great, but the billboard trees remain daytime lit. I'm using just a simple directional light (turned way down).

With scene lighting on:



With scene lighting off (using editor lighting):



Note that the billboard trees look exactly the same whether scene lighting is on or off, but the 3D trees look different. The first screenshot with the dark 3D trees is how I want it to look (night time). Below are my directional light settings.



Scene lighting settings:



Environment settings:



The trees came from here: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vegetation/trees/dream-forest-tree-105297

BTW the grass works perfectly. I would have thought since grass are billboards as well that they and the billboard trees would work similarly. But no, grass goes light with the scene lighting turned off, and dark with it turned on, which is correct. Billboard trees are completely unaffected by scene lighting (they are always light).

 

BTW this is a regular 3D Unity project (not HDRP or universal) using 2020.1.8f1.

 

I have the same issue Basic Render Pipeline, Unity 2021.1.21f1.

 

Did you guys figure out what was causing it?

 

I'm having the same issue, has anyone found a solution? I've increased my billboard start in the terrain settings, which gets rid of the lit trees, but basically means all my trees are now rendered in 3D, which is causing the VR headset to have dragging issues.

Need to figure out how to adjust how light affects the billboards. Cheers.

 

I found a solution a couple months ago to this issue by adding code to the shader which changed the layer which it was rendered. I can't find the link anymore! The error was reintroduced probably by me upgrading unity and now I cannot find the forum post anywhere that dealt with this. I did fix this in this past by changing the code in the shader though (I think I changed the URP/ComplexLit shader. I think it was only two lines. I have spent half a day searching for the original forum post about this and cannot find it. I will continue to search. If anyone finds the lines of code to add to the shader to fix billboard trees staying lit at night time we desperately need this. Sorry this wasn't more helpful. Hopefully someone else will respond with that link and I will continue to search for it.