Creating a VERY dark scene

I have created a scene on my (admittedly old) PC using Unity 5. It's an outside scene with the first person character surrounded by buildings. It's a night scene and the character has a lamp which shines only a few feet in front and to the side. Objects/buildings outside the glow of the lamp are of course not seen until you get close. If you look up you can see the twilight of the sky and hence it's possible to see a silhouette of the buildings against the night sky. Using my old PC to create this and on uploading it to the net and accessing using unity web player it looks great via my PC. I can walk around and only the closest objects become illuminated as I get close. I can see the skyline of buildings (black silhouette as they should be) against the dark sky. All well and good.

Problem: I have viewed this scene on son's (much better) gaming PC and everything that should be dark (black and in shadow) is perfectly visible from any distance. Essentially the scene looks like daylight (admittedly dull but still visible).

So any person viewing the scene on a S***e PC (like mine) will see a nicely rendered scene of night time, torch-lit streets but anyone with a better PC will see far too much of what I want the to see.

What do I do?

I know that the first reply I get will say 'get a better PC to work on' and I would agree, but until I do that how should I set things up? I've even gone as far as adjusting the lighting so that (on my PC) the scene is pitch black. Yet on son's PC I can see the whole scene still.

Question: On a fab PC how would I set up a scene to depict the scenario above? (night time, very dark so you can only see a few feet ahead, yet you can see the skyline against the night sky?

If I can get the lighting right on my son's PC then at least I can continue working.

Shouldn't all PC's render the scene the same? I mean I assume that a very dark scene on son's PC would indeed be a black screen on mine.

Thanks for the advice.

 

Sounds to me as if you're mixing up rendering so that the version you have is possibly DX9 and the version on your son's computer is DX11, and the shaders/whatever are falling back to a more primitive shader. Without much more information, i doubt anyone will be capable of helping.

 

Thanks for the reply. Indeed, my version is DX9 32 bit whereas my son's is DX11 64 bit. Is it possible to set a unity scene to render at DX9 on a X11 PC ?

 

Yes, via edit->project settings->player

Likely the project is set to work in DX11, but is falling back in your case. You just need to change that to be DX9 by default. It is under "Other Settings" and may or may not require you to untick Auto Graphics API, depending on Unity version. Just mess about there.

 

Okay, I've looked in edit>project settings>player under 'other settings' but I can't see anything regarding DX9/11 settings. There's nothing really there that would allow me to alter any render settings as far as I can see.

I'll have to have a play to see if I can find a work around.
thanks

 

try disable light in window->lightning

 

I don't know how you have it set up but if you are not using fog as darkness then try it. Fog should remain the same no matter what. Make the color of the fog black and then make it start as far as your lamp light ends.

 

Thanks for the replies guys. I have tweaked things and got it to look acceptable in son's PC. I have an external hard drive so I basically plugged unity and my scene into his PC and tweaked it while using his PC.

Thank you for your suggestions, They've helped me pin-point what I needed to do to fix the problem.

thanks