Question My scene is way too dark. Getting desperate...

If someone could steer me in the right direction here, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've been trying to solve this for two days now, which means the solution is probably going to be a face-palm.

I have a very simple scene built using the HDRP template. It has just a few objects and three lights: one directional light and two spot lights. The scene is very, very dark. So dark, in fact that in order to get any reasonably acceptable lighting in the scene, I have to crank the Intensity values on all my lights so high that the Inspector is displaying them in scientific notation (billions of lumens, which is silly).

All the lights are set to Realtime. I'm using forward rendering (changing to deferred makes no difference). I have baked GI turned off (turning it on makes no difference). I've seen suggestions of turning off HDR on the camera but the camera has no such flag (vast amounts of information on the Internet for solving Unity issues is very frustratingly out-of-date).

If anyone can help steer me toward a solution, you will be my hero.

Edit: I also tried dropped the value of HDRP Default Settings -> HDRP Sky -> Exposure to 1. Didn't help.

 

Post a screenshot, so we can see whats going on.

 

I rebuilt the entire project from a new HDRP template figuring I had messed up my settings somehow but I have the same issue with the new project. In this new project, I tried changed a couple of parameters to try to narrow down the problem so in these screenshots, I have HDRP Sky Exposure dropped down to 1. I removed the profile in Lighting Settings (set to None). I have baked global illumination on with Shadowmask as the lighting mode. None of these changes made much of a difference.

The scene has three spotlights and one directional light shining almost straight down. The spotlights are positioned roughly five units away from the cube. The intensity of all the lights in this screenshot are the default values (10 lux for the directional light, 600 lumens for the spots):



Here is the scene with the intensity of the spot lights increased to 6000 lumens. The scene tends to wash out rather than get any brighter (perhaps that's normal with increasing light intensity, I don't know):



And here is what happens when I rotate the camera up on its X axis to look more parallel to my ground plane:

 

It might be helpful to point out that the ground in the scene is just a quad with the "Stud_Mat" material from the included construction set scene applied to it.

Also interesting is there is only one shadow cast. Perhaps that's normal in this situation and it's probably not relevant to my lighting issue.

 

Here's how you set up a HDRP scene correctly;
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...ual/Upgrading-To-HDRP.html#adjusting-lighting
You haven't set up any volume overrides yet, so HDRP uses the default render settings, which in your case has auto exposure enabled. The exposure control tries to compensate for your pitch-black background and as a result everything else gets super bright.

 

Thanks so much for your assistance. I followed the instructions in that link from the very beginning, creating a new "3D With Extras" project and once the project was loaded I created a new scene (just a default camera and directional light) and then followed all the steps except for the ones at the end relating to correcting the specific lights and materials in the construction set scene, which I'm not using.

I still need to give my directional light about five million lux and my spot lights about one million lumens in order to brighten my scene. However, it does seem to be behaving a lot more stable than it was before (previously, five million lux on the directional light made almost no change at all in lighting). If I rotate the camera up close to parallel with my ground plane the scene still explodes into over-lit bloom. I don't know whether or not this is something I should just accept at this point. I'm only trying to create a simple indoor scene. The camera never moves, anyway. The important part for me is that I can actually brighten my scene now.

That link was very helpful and I think I can probably just live with this. If someone can suggest anything that could give me any further insight into what in blazes about Unity's lighting system I'm simply not grasping I would greatly appreciate it. I've read online documentation and articles until doomsy-day and I still can't isolate what's going wrong.

 

+1

 

It is very difficult to find the balance settings between light sources in HDRP
You have to go step by step:

Part 1:
1. Create a volume (global)
2. Add visual environment then switch to HDRI Sky mode and dynamic update mode
3. Add HDRI Sky override
4. Now you must find proper settings for HDRI SKY exposure firstly

Part 2.:
After finding proper HDRI SKY exposure settings (normally it is 10-11), now you must add indirect light controller override

1.Add indirect light controller override
2. change indirect light value to simulate your sky light exposure (Ambient light in built-in pipeline)

Part 3:
1. Add Exposure override
2. Use fixed mode and change exposure intensity to get the best result
note : Auto mode is very hard to find proper settings

note: you can replace part 3 and part 2 (add Exposure first then indirect controller override)

Now you must find proper directional light exposure
120.000 is for sunny day time

https://forum.unity.com/threads/light-exposure-adjusting-automatically-solved.1070444/

My computer does not currently have a suitable graphics card
In the future, I will record and share the relevant videos