Feedback Why all these light types when most dont seem to do what they should? And break.

Im trying not to be frustrated, really hard, but i have now spent days and days not building a game, but constantly trying to change thing with lights, and in the end, even when i think oh hey , thats not bad, i come back to my scene later, and discover half the lights are just not functioning... (baked light even showing in lightmap mode) no light coming from the lights... volumetrics on lights, randomly just stops working... i dont get it.

So, my most recent headache, is this. An area light. Now for one, im trying to wrap my head around why an area light, even has a sphere gizmo... and furthermore, why it seems that the only real light coming from it at all barring using obscene light values, seems to be around the sphere gizmo. But then again, i ask , what good is an area light if this is how it behaves?

Yes i have tried every setting and config possible i think. Range Atten or not, high , low intensity, exposure settings through the yin yang... bah... no , its clear in this pic , that an area light does not function as 'I' would assume.

heres an image... https://ibb.co/72859dg

But it doesnt end here... As i said, i have now recreated my lights a dozen times over, and from scratch i have setup 4 spot lights on a large track light , configured volumetrics etc, and it all looks great. Then, i come bacck to the scene later and discover, 1 or 2 of 4 have no volumetrics on every other light, sometimes theres literally no light coming from them at all , not even showing the baked light, yet in lightmap mode it clearly shows.

Gawd, i am so frustrated with unity lights at this time.

It's probably just me doing it all wrong, but i will say this , having a trillion different settings and types of things isnt always better and clearly this system has issues.

Heres one last one just grinding my gears. How come it is i can create a spot light, and NOT see the option 'AT' , until i change the light type to something else and then back again,. How many other settings are hidden behind debug mode such as the camera clear flags, or just simply bugged out and dont work,.?


PS Heres an image of the debug view of suspect light. Its not even set to a baked rectangle ffs.... nor can it be changed, yet, clearly it is not a box, or rectangle. https://ibb.co/cvhdRPS

If these arent bugs, well i apologize, but what then are they?.... And if they are bugs, this is something that should not need to be called out, its as reproducible as eatin and releasin each day.

Rant over.,

PS: SOLVED FINALLY. Please do NOT delete this thread, i think it shows just how non-user friendly and unintuitive unity has become over the years. And how did i get an area light to actually be an area light.

Well it turns out, in HDRP, hidden behind DEBUG, under the HDLightData is the exact same settings all over again for the light shape.. And there it was, rectangle. OFC, it still doesnt function correctly, and in the end , i chose a spot light set to Box, and started getting ok results.

Cmon guys... why are we searching behind debug mode for common changeable properties... and not even on the light, in the HDComponent, which has nothing visible by default until you hit debug... yea ok. Cheers.

 

Lighting workflows can become complex since you have all the baking, realtime and or screenspace to deal with as well as probes and light maps.

For the area light however, it's fundamentally a lightmap light, ie it has to be baked into light maps.

This would mean that your lighting targets in your project should be quite well balanced with direct and indirect before you begin baking indirect lights into lightmaps.

"Balanced" depends on the project as you can use realistic or unrealistic values depending on game design needs.

You do have render pipeline debuggers to help you see where light it being applied in your scene (direct/indirect/GI/lightmaps/lightprobes)
It's well worth familiarising yourself with that.

Hope this helps best some of the frustrations you're having.

 

Ahh yes, i have been spending much more time familiarizing myself with these things, as your post yesterday pointed out, the mode was a major player, i am still having issues, though, its slowly getting better and better. Right now im attempting to reel things into a more stable frame rate as since switching to indirect, wowza, what a difference in performance,.

Thanks again guys.