Unknown White Orbs in Scene?

I keep finding these odd White Orbs in the Editor and Game Scenes. There are no GameObjects at these locations, I have removed all light probes (for testing), and these orbs can only be seen when the camera is in specific locations. But they do appear randomly as the player (or Camera rather) move about.

I have baked my scenes with both Enlighten and the Progressive LightMapper and these artifacts persist.

Can anyone tell me;

a) What they are? Where do they come from?
b) How do I remove them?

 

What post process are you using? If you notice there's a dark dot in the center of the "white orbs". One of your shaders is causing a NaN value to be written to the framebuffer. I've noticed NaNs show up when ever I used baked lighting and HDR rendering in Unity; so it's likely ultimately a bug Unity needs to fix on their end, though they haven't in the 3 years since I first started seeing it.

The latest Post Processing Stack v2 from Unity's GitHub has an option for NaN suppression that can work around the issue.

 

You nailed it!

It is related to the Bloom Post Processing Effect. Like you, I have seen this issue for years and never could figure out where it was caused from. The Anti-flicker option in the Bloom PPE seems to toggle these Orbs on and off; so I will try that along with the PPE v2. And just to add salt to the wound, Ill file a bug report as well. (Case 994586)

Thank You Very Much!

 

Unity has recognized this issue and has placed this Bug Report into the queue to be addressed.

 

I remember a post years ago, discussing this same glowing orb NaN problem.

Thanks for giving us a good explanation and ways to identify this
glowing orb NaN problem bgolus.

Wow! You learn something new everyday.

NaN = Not a number.

 

The most common NaN in mathematics is any real number divided by zero. Somewhat ironically x / 0.0 in a shader won't return a NaN, but instead infinity. However for the purposes of shader dev an infinity is usually just as catastrophic as a NaN. The NaN suppression in the Post Processing Stack v2 in fact tests for both isnan() and isinf(). More than likely somewhere something is doing an inadvertent divide by zero.

It's only an issue when HDR is enabled because you can't get an inf when not using a float texture. An ARGB32 render texture will clamp an inf or nan to 1 or 0.