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Light Probes need culling mask

Discussion in 'Global Illumination' started by Gillissie, May 8, 2019.

  1. Gillissie

    Gillissie

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    I recently discovered that light probes from an additively loaded scene were affecting 3D elements intended for UI display, despite being tens of thousands of units away from the light probes. Light probes currently have no falloff range, and no culling mask to make it so they only affect certain things (like how lights work). Currently, the only way to avoid using Light Probes on a mesh is to disable them on each mesh that doesn't want them.
    I also tried putting a cube of light probes around the lights in the scene, out of falloff range of the lights, so that the nearest probe to my other meshes wouldn't have any light emitting from them. However, if you have light probes enabled for a mesh (default), then ambient light doesn't affect it (which is also odd to me).
     
  2. thefranke

    thefranke

    Unity Technologies

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    Hey Gillisie,

    Light Probe enabled meshes always sample from the nearest probeset, which may be thousands of units away, but still "nearest" to the mesh, so if you do not want objects to receive probe lighting, simply disable it on the mesh.

    That should not happen. Ambient light and Light Probes will be combined. Which version of Unity are you using? Is this happening in the Player and/or in the Editor? Which render pipeline are you using?

    Cheers
     
  3. Gillissie

    Gillissie

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    Yes, that is one of my points that I mentioned. The suggestion is that they behave more like lights and have a culling mask so you can choose what layers are affected by the probe set.

    Version 2018.3.11f1
    I'm not sure how to answer the render pipeline question. Whatever is default? It's happening in the editor. So far I've had a lot of graphical corruption in my standalone builds, but not worrying about that right now since I'm still months away from release.

    Also, I just noticed that I'm still getting the effect of light probes in the scene after unloading the scene that had them, which is another issue.
     
  4. Gillissie

    Gillissie

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    I would like to emphasize that turning off light probes on all the renderers means touching hundreds of renderers that are in objects that are already set to a layer for rendering for certain camera and lights. It's silly that I can't just use the same layer information in a culling mask for light probes. Double work.
     
  5. thefranke

    thefranke

    Unity Technologies

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    Gotcha, thanks for the clarification.

    In your case the default is the builtin pipeline, but we also have the Scriptable Render Pipelines that can be used these days.

    Are you using multiple scenes? I.e., you have one scene with probes and one or more others, and you are unloading the scene with the probes?

    Cheers
     
  6. Gillissie

    Gillissie

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    I am unloading the scene with the probes, yet the effect from them persists in the rest of the scene.
     
  7. thefranke

    thefranke

    Unity Technologies

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    That workflow of unloading an additive scene with the probes of that scene vanishing too is not supported I'm afraid. However, there's good news. For 19.3 we plan to support additive loading/unloading of probes!

    Cheers