Lack of Specular reflection after lighting finishes baking

Hey,

Been fooling around with the new lighting system, and I'm having an issue where all the specular reflections disappear on my objects after lighting is finished baking. The specular reflects appear while the scene is baking, but upon completion they all go away. Is this a bug or an intended feature and I'm supposed to add specular reflections to lightmapped objects some other way?

All of my objects are set to static. I've attached a pic of the scene while baking, after baking, and my lighting settings.



and then after baking...





Erik

 

In "General GI" select "Directional Specular" unstead of just "Directional". But it's produces some black artifacts

 

That resolved the issue for the static objects, thanks!

I can't seem to find a way to get specular reflections on non-static objects with light and reflection probes in a scene, though. When I delete the light probes/reflection probe the Directional and point light I have both give a specular reflection to non-static objects. It was my understanding that light probes were to global illumination information to a non-static mesh (and reflection probes real time reflections) but they'd still receive specular highlights from nearby lights. It's kind of an adventure figuring this all out, though.

 

Light probes give you the diffuse light, reflection probes give you the specular light.

If you want your baked light sources to show up as specular reflections then they need to be represented on the reflection probe cube maps. For example, if you actually have a bright light blub object where you light is coming from, then it will be rendered into the cube map and it will become a specular highlight on your objects.

If you think about it, it's kinda weird to have light randomly coming from a point in space with no visual representation of why there would be light coming from it.

Does that make any sense?

 

Definitely. I guess I was mostly looking for a way to make the dynamic sun on the skybox represented in the light probe.

Thanks for the reply, was worried it was a bug or something!

 

Hi Zomby

I'm in the same situation as Iron-Warrior, but I don't really understand your answer. If I add a reflection probe to the scene I still don't get specular in the non static objects. The only way I have to get that is having two directional lights lights (in a very simple setup), one bake only and the other realtime only. In this way I get the nice diffuse bounce lights form the probes and the specular from the realtime light. But this is a bit cumbersome, the ideal situation is having both things working when the light is in mixed. As iron-warrior says there is a short moment in the editor where you have specular and probes working in the same non-static object, but as soon as it finished you loose the specular term.

This had happened since Unity 4, and I have never understood well why the decision to remove the specular when the probes are on. Doesn't have sense being able to use the diffuse lightning of the probes and grabbing the specular from a directional light?

 

Hey Bravo, Zomby is basically saying that any light source in your scene should have a corresponding real-world object representing it. So if you have a bright green point light, you should also have a bright green light bulb of some sort (a mesh renderer) at it's position, since in the real world all sources of light emit from an object of some sort.

It would be nice if you could enable it though since I'm sure someone will have a use case of wanting a light without a mesh renderer, but it might just be a limitation of the technique Unity uses for their lighting. Being able to include the sun's reflection would be good though.

 

Thanks Iron-Warrior, now I get it.

 

In my brief testing the past few days (luckily) I haven't encountered this bug. But it was a tiny, tiny scene.

 

I get those black artifacts sometimes. It's usually caused by overlapping geometry.

 

Do you know what solution will be in the releases above 5.5?
Specular lightmaps got already depreciated in Unity 5.5
https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.5.0#section-changes

 

I guess you'll have to wait for 5.6 and proper mixed mode lights.

Right now, you could switch the lights to realtime.

 

Specular maps still work in 5.5, so I would rather stick to them or directional ones on static scenes, because of better look and performance.
And wait for new 5.6 options.

 

I really wonder if directional specular mode is faster than a realtime light with realtime GI.

And baked GI doesn't look particularly better than realtime GI.

 

You might be right. Realtime GI got much better since start of Unity 5.x. and even Unity tech demos use realtime GI rather than baked. I should be going to check that on some of my scenes.

I have just made comparison here:

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/dynamic-lighting-vs-baked-which-one-is-better.186944/#post-2877226

An my judgement is that the baked lighting option is - as we should expect - much better for static scenes.