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[Released] Probe-O-Matic

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by MattFS, Jan 31, 2019.

  1. MattFS

    MattFS

    Joined:
    Jul 14, 2009
    Posts:
    219
    Hello!

    First release to the Asset Store for us is Probe-O-Matic, a tool to assist with the placement of Light Probes which we found to be a tedious task!

    As the tool came about to address our own development needs, any feedback and suggestions are welcome to get a better idea of how developers use LightProbes and what sort of functionality would improve their workflow.

    Thanks!


    Description from the Asset Store:
    Probe-O-Matic is an automated Light Probe placement tool to speed up your workflow when it comes to ambient lighting for dynamic objects. Probe-O-Matic offers fast and robust probe placement through a variety of options such as Seeds, Volumes or NavMesh. This tool emerged from our real production need to semi-automate and control how and where light probes are placed in large scenes. Out of the box, Unity currently does not provide an easy way to do this which inspired us to write Editor tools to assist in this task.



    Often, one click after adding a single Seed can get most of a Scene populated
    2019-01-26 01_23_41-Window.png


    Nav-mesh placement is interesting as there's not always a gauruntee that the mesh conforms to the real geometry. For example, a Terrain that has gentle hills may generate only 2 NavMesh triangles. With this tool, it will tesselate the the NavMesh triangles up until the distance specified in the settings.
    2019-01-21 19_56_06.png

    For situations like lifts/platforms, there is the traditional 'Volume' that can be oriented any way and will evenly space points based on the Generation Settings. This means, you can setup a single Scriptable Object of the Generation settings and know you'll have even spacing with most of the probes.
    2019-01-21 19_53_48.png
     

    Attached Files:

  2. nsxdavid

    nsxdavid

    Joined:
    Apr 6, 2009
    Posts:
    476
    So this asset shows some promise, but has trouble in it's traversal logic. A good example is this:

    upload_2019-8-3_22-49-42.png

    As it's marching up this ramp, it comes to a spot that has a bit of a lip to it. The code recognizes the lateral raycast is hitting a ramp and tries to adjust for that by pitching up and raycasting again, looking for open space. In this case, the ray hits the lip and considers that a wall and just stops. So it can't continue on.

    You can get around this by raising the Height Off Ground value, but unfortunately when you don't have probes at the ground, you can get bad light probe lighting on anything small near the ground.

    This could be fixes with some more sophisticated logic in the traversal.
     
  3. MattFS

    MattFS

    Joined:
    Jul 14, 2009
    Posts:
    219
    Hi @nxsdavid, so sorry for the late reply here!

    Thanks for the feedback and the description as to how this occurred, will look into this and create some more rigorous test scenarios including trying to catch your case above.

    Cheers!