Reflection Probes without Light Probes - very dark result.

I have noticed that using Reflection Probes very often make objects very dark, I know some people use Light probes to make the result brighter.
Is the ambient light overwritten ?

What can a person that don't use light mapping do - to make it more bright ?

 

Add real time lights.

 

I have a directional (sun) light, and Physical Based Light ambient light.
I'm definitely not going to add some additional lights just for Reflection Probes to look good, I would remove Reflection Probes first.

I thought there is some "legit" way to do this.
The only idea I got is to script edit the reflection probe texture after baking by increase the brightness of it.

 

Reflection probes capture the environment, if the environment is dark, they will also be dark, which is why I suggested adding lights.

I am unsure what exactly you want to achieve, some images would help.

 

Yes I know but, without reflection probe I got the scene ambient light, with reflection probe it looks like the ambient light is no longer taken into account.

I will play with it a little day after tomorrow, I might do some screenshots.

 

Do you have fixed exposure?

 

I'm using auto exposure.
But what is surprising is that reflection probe looks different than what my camera can see, and yes it looks like exposure problem, since entrances to corridor are totally overexposed, and the corridor inside looks underexposed.

And my models look very dark when I set metallic to some very high values (mirror like)

Below you can see corridor, and light probe on the right side.

I'm using HDRP and Physical Based Lighting for ambient.

 

The probe-result looks fine, just what you would expect from a linear space HDRI without any post-processing.
Your camera output is very different from that (gamma space, low dynamic range and post-processing like auto-exposure, tonemapping etc.).

EDIT
Baked reflection probes don't capture indirect light, only realtime probes do that.

 

So what can I do to have functional reflection probes with real time lighting ?
Because the result right now is definitely unacceptable.

 

Real time lighting, are you sure?
That would require realtime reflection probes as well, but it's almost impossible to maintain good performance with such a setup.
The closest you can get to "realtime" is described here; https://forum.unity.com/threads/ssg...enoiser-and-performance.1211346/#post-7836549

 

Baked Reflection Probes with non baked lighting, and no light probes.
It is a real time lighting but without changes.

 

Please take a look at the picture below, one is real time reflection probe with on enabled, the second is baked one.
Is such a huge difference a normal thing ?

 

You said your lighting setup is real time, baked reflection probes get their indirect light from light maps, but you dont have any so the result is pitch black.
Either switch to baked lighting and bake lightmaps, or stick to realtime reflection probes.

 

First of all, thank you for the answer, It is always a pleasure to receive it from a trusted source.

After some hours of messing around with parameters I was able to find what the problem is, I don't know If this should be considered a BUG.

So as we suspected it is the ambient light problem, In my Volume profile if the VisualEnvironment->Mode is set to dynamic than baked reflection probe is ignoring ambient light.

I decided to set mode to static and inside Window->Rendering->Lighting->Environment->StaticLightingSky I set to PhysicallyBasedSky

Reflection Probe was baked correctly, at least it is almost identical to real time one.








Also I have noticed one thing, when using Realtime reflection probe it will reflect everything, static and dynamic objects.
This is desirable when using Every Frame mode but might not be desirable when using OnEnable or OnDamand.
It would be quite useful to be able to enable/disable rendering of dynamic objects even when using Realtime Reflection Probe.

 

Using Culling Mask is not an option, I'm using layers for physics.
Anyway this is a minor issue for me right now. Bigger one is the problem of baking dynamic ambient light into Reflection Probe.

 

Thank you for your effort I will try to investigate It some more on a clean project.

 

I have created totally new project (minimal HDRP) default settings and I see the same problem Baked Reflecton Probe ignoring ambient light.
Unity3d 2021.2.13f1 HDRP

I see you are using non static objects in your example.


Please set your walls and floors to static, and try to bake, you should see the completely black parts on your Reflection probe.

If it works for you correctly please allow me to send you my minimal project.

 

I'm starting to have some remorse for asking you of additional favor but I have invested some additional hours into experimenting and I think I have narrowed issue even more.

What I have noticed is that baking reflection probe is using Window->Rendering->Lighting->Environment settings and scene volume kind of at the same time, like not all options but some.
I have created additional profile (with kind of reddish ambient color) and put it into Environment settings.
I baked reflection and as a result I get reddish reflection probe.
When I switch to Realtime OnEnable Reflection probe there is no reddish color and scene profile is used.


I have tried to send a Bug report (2 times), but I got an error "Unable to Write" (whatever this means) every time.

 

I was able to send the report today, it is titled "Reflection Probe types to different from eachother."
I categorized it as problem with editor, but I'm not sure it is a good choice.