Question Light's Culling Mask does not work with custom layers.

Unity 2021.3.19f

I'm working on a scene which uses little lighting, making it very dark. This is intentional. There is one object however (a door) that is a bit too dark, almost black. Just for this object, I want to add an extra light, but I don't want this extra light to influence the rest of the scene.

So I created a layer "Extra Light" and changed the layer of the door to this layer.



This immediately causes to door to loose all lighting - which is as expected. I then create a (point) light and set the Culling Mask to "Extra Light".



Nothing happens. The door does not get lighted. I tried Realtime, I tried Baked mode and making the door static. No matter what I do, the door does not get lighted and stays black.

In fact, even though the light's Culling Mask has been set to "Extra Light", it lights everything (except the door).

So what am I doing wrong here?

 

EDIT: Changed title from "Trying to light one object with one specific light. Does not work." to "Light's Culling Mask does not work with custom layers" since that is actually more accurate.

So actually, the Culling Mask does not work with any newly created layer. If I use one of the predefined layers, it works. But for obvious reason, I want to use a custom layer. So my questions still stands.

 

Ok, what actually happens is that the door simply disappears as soon as I put it on a custom layer. I thought the door became black but it actually disappears (it's standing in a very, very dark corner so I didn't notice it disappeared).

 

Found it. In the renderer settings, newly added layers aren't added to any of the Layer Masks:



So enabling the layer in the Opaque Layer Mask made the door visible(and lit by the extra light).

 

Oh, even though the door is now lit, the light still lights all objects, even though its Culling Mask is set to "Extra Light" only.

 

Thank you for your answer. Unfortunately, this does not work with baked lights. As soon as I set the light to "Baked", the "Rendering Layers" option disappears.

 

Ok, since all of my above posts might be a bit confusion, I tried to put in a table what happens.

I have a Point Light, with its Culling Mask set to "Extra Light". I alternated between Realtime and Baked mode
I also have have a Static GameObject. The layer of this object alternates between "Extra Light" and "Default". The shader's lighting between "Lit" and "Baked Lit".

I have put this in below table. Green means the object got lit, black means it didn't got lit. The check mark means that this is correct, an X means this is incorrect:



As you can see, when the light is set to Realtime mode, the results are always as they should. If I change its mode to "Baked", all results are incorrect.

 

So is this a bug?

 

You can try using "Rendering Layers" (also called Light Layers or Decal Layers) instead of game object layers.

Note: Baked Lit shader doesn't receive real-time lighting, only baked lighting from lightmaps after baking.

 

Maybe that's because the light baking doesn't support it and there's no rendering layers in the Meta pass (used during lightmap baking).

 

Yes, I know, as can be seen in the table above. The problem is, with the point light's culling mask set to "Extra Light" and it's mode set to "Baked", it lights (bakes) exactly the opposite of what is should light (bake).