Terrain Light Seams

Greetings everybody!

I have a problem that I can't seem to solve.
I have a terrain that has these light seams everywhere on it, which I am trying to get rid of.(see picture)
I am using Unity 2018.2.5f1 Personal.

If someone could provide me with some suggestions for a solution, I'd be extremely thankful.
Thank you in advance!

Kind regards,
Alex

 

Sorry it's far from clear what that screenshot means.

 

Thank you for the reply. Sorry, what do you mean? Should I screenshot some settings or something else? The screenshot just shows the seams on the terrain which are caused by the light. It's the scene view in the editor. Please let me know if there is any information I can provide to make it more clear or help solve the problem.

 

bump... sorry, i just really don't know how to fix it.

 

I have smoothed out the terrain to see where the seams are and the issue seems to only appear where the lanterns light up the area. If I move the lights around, the seams/artifacts are appearing around. No idea why but maybe it makes sense to someone?

 

If those lights are all real-time lights, it could be the Pixel Light Count under your Rendering settings (hard to tell from the screen though).

Edit > Project Settings > Quality. Increase this number and see if the issue goes away. If it does, it's because you have too many lights overlapping, which results in the light count for some areas being exceeded.

 

Thank you so much for that! This worked!
I've tried probably every lightmapping setting there is for terrain and baked lightmaps for hours and nothing worked. Eventually I used a free asset (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/mesh-terrain-editor-free-67758) to convert my terrain into a mesh and that got rid of the seams - but your solution looks much much better than mine.
I really appreciate your help. Thank you again.

 

Happy to help! Just keep in mind that as that value goes up and you get a lot of overlapping lights, your performance will start decreasing substantially, especially on mobile.

Best of luck with your project.

 

Thank you!
If I may ask one last question since I am not familiar with that setting, is there some sort of reference on where I should keep this number? I believe the scene will only have around 15 lights at max and the pixel light count has been increased to 14 by me for best visual quality.

 

It's not the number of lights in the scene, it's more the number of lights that overlap at any given point in the scene. So if you have a max setting of 4 and there is a point in the scene where 5 lights overlap, you'll get the results in your screenshot. So you can have 30 lights and never have this issue if they are spread out around the scene, but if you have only 5 lights and they all overlap with a PLC setting of 4, you'll get odd lighting.

I'm a bit confused though. You said you tried baking lightmaps in your previous post(?) Unless there is a bug in the editor version you're using, lightmapping should not be affected by the PLC value, it is used purely for realtime lighting.

 

If you lightmap your scene anyway, wouldn't it make more sense to use emissive materials for the lamps instead + light probes? Having so many point lights floating around there seems a bit overdone to me...

 

There is always the chance that he doesn't know how to use light probes. Maybe we help him get a handle on lighting before implying he's doing it incorrectly or that there are better ways to achieve his goal, yeah? He has posted 6 times in the forums and has been a member since June, cut him some slack and maybe share how he would setup said lighting or move on to the next thread. One could easily argue that you're off-topic.

 

Seriously? What we do now (arguing over a helpful tip from my part) is off-topic. Every other person would've directed him straight to the Learn section (more specifically: Graphics), mainly because he's new in using Unity.

 

My point is that we don't know if he is new to using Unity and that he wasn't asking anything beyond why he is getting the results he is getting. Regardless of what everyone else would have posted, I stepped in to help and the problem was already solved, he was merely asking me clarify a few things. The issue was solved, he didn't ask about light probes or how to get better performance, he asked why his lighting had seams, and the answer to that has nothing to do with light probes. I'd agree that it was a helpful tip if it had been delivered in a helpful way whatsoever, but it wasn't, it was delivered as though he should already know these things. You even admitted that it seems "overdone to you...", but he wasn't asking for feedback, he was asking for someone to help solve a problem and that had already occurred.

 

Relax guys
I'm fairly new to Unity. I've worked at 2D projects before but this is my first 3D project. I don't know much about lightmapping and actually nothing about light probes. These lanterns are also just placeholder, eventually there will be particle systems with fireflies flying around, lighting the area. The part that had the seams on it is a big terrain, which has 'Lightmap static' enabled. (if that is even related to what you're saying)
I will do a little bit of research about light probes but I think if I'm replacing the lanterns with particles anyways, that isn't applicable? In any case, I'm thankful for your posts in this topic. Cheers guys.

 

I assumed as much, and no offense, if you're having trouble with PLC then light probes are a ways off. Whether or not light probes will work for your situation depends on a lot of factors. I'm glad you've got it working but I am going to exit this thread before it gets completely hijacked. My apologies and best of luck.

 

Also, if you get hung up something like this again feel free to PM me if you want. I won't do the work for you but I have no problem taking a bit of time to help out someone learning the ropes.