Thank you man for explaining things so clearly and efficiently. I am so happy you don't waste time on the basics of the engine and just talk directly about the video topic.
Hi, great video. I’ve watched the Unity talk on this new feature and they made it sound like you can use baked Lightmaps and adaptive probes. They show how to light your scene with probes only with great results. What I’m confused on is you used to have to go in to each object and set the check box to “ use light probes” in the inspector. I didn’t see any one do this with the new feature, with that said how do you determine then what about is going to use light maps or probes ?
Thanks! You do still need to go into the asset and enable the GI contribution to use a probes instead of Lightmaps (if that is what you’re trying to do), which is something I don’t do in this video. I have a good video I did on that exactly, where I use the smart search to find all objects in the scene that I want to be on APV and bake everything there, setting all items to the same settings to use APV. I hope this helps. If not I am happy to dive further into this with you! ua-cam.com/video/qxXf0jeQnX0/v-deo.htmlsi=PeFcYtYcnBefmaK6 Typically, if I am having trouble with assets in the scene behaving as I expect, I start with looking in the light map tab of lighting and see what appears to be baking there instead of using the probes, but it is unfortunately a manual solution.
Great. I watched it. I get it now. I’m glad I picked Unity 2 years ago, pretty cool stuff. When you do the 2 scenarios from day to night, can that adjust point light values too? Like post lamps at night you would want them on vs day
Fantastic! It would adjust the baked APV scenarios independently from the lights themselves, but there’s no reason you couldn’t enable, disable, or animate between point lights in parallel.
ua-cam.com/video/IpVuIZYFRg4/v-deo.htmlsi=tgZ62d8P-q4ca_-r (Min 20:05) in this lecture they use rendering layers for the interior and exterior tent. I’m assuming that is 2 different meshes( inside and out) since they set 2 different layers . If your tent was just one mesh( inside and out) could you just shrink down the tent apv volume to be inside the tent to prevent this leaking ?
I typically leave my directional light mixed to leverage the real-time shadows that come with it from the direct lighting and then baking the indirect lighting.
I am unsure on that one. I do know the following from the documentation: Because Adaptive Probe Volumes can cover a whole scene, screen space effects can fall back to Light Probes to get lighting data from GameObjects that are off-screen or occluded. For example, Screen Space Global Illumination. Also, Unity can use the data in Adaptive Probe Volumes to adjust lighting from Reflection Probes so it more closely matches the local environment, which reduces the number of Reflection Probes you need. I don’t see a specific callout for specular reflections, though.
There are a couple answers here. In short, yes, if all objects are set to be using the APV for GI to bake a Baking Set, it will not show up as a baked light map. The light information will instead be baked into the set, so it is still saved to allow for things like scenario blending. I would recommend checking out my 2nd APV video to better understand the idea of baking. ua-cam.com/video/qxXf0jeQnX0/v-deo.htmlsi=JX58ZzchE4ExixBg The 2nd answer is that I did this first video quick and dirty to show a comparison to light probe groups, so one of the steps that would force the objects in scene to not bake light maps, setting each game object to use APV for GI, I actually didn’t do here. Meaning if you look at these assets a bit closer, they’re likely still baking a traditional light map for the baked lighting.
APV is not supported by WebGL, it requires features that WebGL is not capable of. It may be possible for WebGPU to support APV in the future, but it does not currently.
It looks great, but I'm having problems with them and my shaders. Sometimes after baking, one of my shaders created on Amplify shaders stops working and can't seem to find any info about what could be.
Interesting. Does Amplify Shaders operate on the shader graph system where you can poke around and see which nodes could be the culprit? Happy to help in any way, but I've not used Amplify Shaders myself.
I appreciate the feedback and you sharing your thoughts on Lumen. Lumen is an exciting technology and I hope both Unity and Unreal continue doing awesome things in this space to bring the best creation tools to the talented creators out there!
There are a problem with the implementation. Static object should be contribute global illumination from probe volume/ light probes instead it is set as lightmap. If lightmap is set then it will bake the lightmap and will be slow.
That is a totally fair comment. I tried to use the first half explaining the differences between what was the go to strategy versus what it is now. One suggestion I might have is to check out my scenario blending video, which gets further into advanced features of APVs. ua-cam.com/video/qxXf0jeQnX0/v-deo.htmlsi=TGTRlnB3rvAB170c
Ever figure out how to use APV for a real-time GI time of day system? I remember Unity showing off the URP example of the Asian style level with that implemented. Anyways I'm sure that will be a video that will get a ton of views since I can't find anything about that on YT.
That's a great idea. That scene is one of the 4 URP sample scenes called the Garden. I'll poke around in there and see if I can replicate the time of day system in a future tutorial.
this adaptive probe volume seems like a hack I did in a day to automate placement in a big scene... and it was better because this doesn't auto-merge probes and it will take a lot of memory OR space
There's actually a pretty major difference between this and light probe groups. The old light probes contribute illumination to the entire object, whereas these are on a per-pixel basis. With the old light probes an object in its entirety would get brighter as it got into a brighter area, even the parts of the objects that weren't actually supposed to be lit. If you had a spotlight for example and a large object, the entire object would get lit, not just the pixels where the spotlight would hit it. These APV probes actually are sampled per-pixel which looks much better, not quite as good but maybe 85%-90% of the quality of lightmaps, something that absolutely can not be said about the old light probe groups.
This approach is good for dynamic objects, but on the static walls and floor you can see the quality is unacceptable. In every corner / edge of the room you can see the outside lighting bleeding through because this system seems to have no concept of occlusion. When lighting the indoor walls and floors probes on the outside should be discarded. Without this essential addition the system is no better than the old "light probe proxy volumes". You could say, what about automatic placement? But imo that really does not count. There have been assets doing the same thing for years and it's easy to write yourself. Quality of life is no selling point when the graphical end result is just not good enough. In the end if you want convincing indoor lighting you will have to use lightmaps, same as ever. Unity desperately needs a "it just works" lighting solution and this once again isn't it. The most complete lighting solution we have is still a combination of the DEPRECATED "real-time GI" system and a script that places light probes automatically. P.S. It's also a shame that all those voxel GI assets never got past an experimental, janky stage. People have been trying for years and years, yet nobody ever made it work properly.
I appreciate your perspective, but feel you're making many assumptions about the light quality of a scene made in 10 minutes to demonstrate a tool. There is a much better representation of APV in the URP sample scenes template in Unity Hub. I'd recommend taking a look at that before drawing too many conclusions, as this video is more intended to show what the feature is and how to set it up, rather than a look at fully deploying the solution and in a polished environment. I am also excited to see what updates come at Unite next week.
@@Ayres3D funny. I actually think of your video as a better representation precisely because it shows the limitations of the technique so clearly. anyone could have covered up the artifacts by making the walls thicker but you didn't. maybe that's an accident but regardless. the video ends up demonstrating exactly what APV can and can't do.
Thanks for the feedback! There are some controls within the tool that'd be worth poking around as well - Such as max and min probe spacing to add more probes or less if needed in certain volumes, probe offsets to customize around unique shapes, etc. For example, virtual offset settings are intended to force invalid probes outside of geometry to eliminate backface hits. There's a lot of cool stuff in here, and I am glad the video was helpful!
@@forasago The GDC talk showed multiple ways to fix light bleeding, you can adjust probes sampling area individually for singular bad probes or use a volume to adjust the sampling location of an area of probes, or invalidate probes. You can adjust how much along a faces normal the sample is taken from as well and how much weight it given to probes based on direction to face normal. Setting up a lighting scenarios properly does take some time, there are reasons that lighting is often an entire separate job in many studios.
They're not light probes auto-placement. They are probes that apply lighting per-pixel. They a just a cheap/bad alternative to lightmaps. They never said the quality will be better than lightmaps, just that you will not have to wait 6 hours to bake, and can change the time of day.
@@Ayres3D baking usually crashes the editor. the event lightProbesUpdated doesnt fire so you cant use LightProbesQuery. property blocks dont work in meta pass, color vertex channel doesnt work in meta pass
Thank you man for explaining things so clearly and efficiently. I am so happy you don't waste time on the basics of the engine and just talk directly about the video topic.
Thanks for the feedback! I am hoping to do many more advanced APV videos. There is so much to cover on this tool!
I am still new to lighting in Unity, It is an obvious demonstration, and I can't wait for more demonstrations
Glad I could help. If there are any specific tutorials you'd be looking for please let me know and I'll prioritize that content.
Man, you're awesome! Thank you!
Thanks for the kind words! Happy to be of help!!
Just found your channel and looking forward to more videos! I would like a video on more new unity 6 stuff they put in it.
Thank you! Fantastic, I am on it
Fantastic demonstration! Looking forward to playing with this myself!
Thank you for the feedback!
The way he built the sample hallway was kinda clean I cannot lie
Much appreciated!
Nicely done Cam!
Thank You!!
Thank you! Very simple and useful explanation.
Glad it was helpful! Thanks for the feedback
Thanks for the tutorial i might port my game to unity 6 since it looks better
That's awesome. Good luck!
Hi, great video. I’ve watched the Unity talk on this new feature and they made it sound like you can use baked Lightmaps and adaptive probes. They show how to light your scene with probes only with great results. What I’m confused on is you used to have to go in to each object and set the check box to “ use light probes” in the inspector. I didn’t see any one do this with the new feature, with that said how do you determine then what about is going to use light maps or probes ?
Thanks! You do still need to go into the asset and enable the GI contribution to use a probes instead of Lightmaps (if that is what you’re trying to do), which is something I don’t do in this video.
I have a good video I did on that exactly, where I use the smart search to find all objects in the scene that I want to be on APV and bake everything there, setting all items to the same settings to use APV. I hope this helps. If not I am happy to dive further into this with you!
ua-cam.com/video/qxXf0jeQnX0/v-deo.htmlsi=PeFcYtYcnBefmaK6
Typically, if I am having trouble with assets in the scene behaving as I expect, I start with looking in the light map tab of lighting and see what appears to be baking there instead of using the probes, but it is unfortunately a manual solution.
Great. I watched it. I get it now. I’m glad I picked Unity 2 years ago, pretty cool stuff. When you do the 2 scenarios from day to night, can that adjust point light values too? Like post lamps at night you would want them on vs day
Fantastic! It would adjust the baked APV scenarios independently from the lights themselves, but there’s no reason you couldn’t enable, disable, or animate between point lights in parallel.
ua-cam.com/video/IpVuIZYFRg4/v-deo.htmlsi=tgZ62d8P-q4ca_-r
(Min 20:05) in this lecture they use rendering layers for the interior and exterior tent. I’m assuming that is 2 different meshes( inside and out) since they set 2 different layers . If your tent was just one mesh( inside and out) could you just shrink down the tent apv volume to be inside the tent to prevent this leaking ?
When using adaptive probe volumes, do you set the directional light mode to Mixed or keep it Realtime?
I typically leave my directional light mixed to leverage the real-time shadows that come with it from the direct lighting and then baking the indirect lighting.
Looks very fast and performant. Can the probe volumes be used for specular reflections as well?
I am unsure on that one. I do know the following from the documentation:
Because Adaptive Probe Volumes can cover a whole scene, screen space effects can fall back to Light Probes to get lighting data from GameObjects that are off-screen or occluded. For example, Screen Space Global Illumination.
Also,
Unity can use the data in Adaptive Probe Volumes to adjust lighting from Reflection Probes so it more closely matches the local environment, which reduces the number of Reflection Probes you need.
I don’t see a specific callout for specular reflections, though.
@@Ayres3D Thanks!
Does using probe volumesmean no lightmaps baked?
There are a couple answers here.
In short, yes, if all objects are set to be using the APV for GI to bake a Baking Set, it will not show up as a baked light map. The light information will instead be baked into the set, so it is still saved to allow for things like scenario blending. I would recommend checking out my 2nd APV video to better understand the idea of baking.
ua-cam.com/video/qxXf0jeQnX0/v-deo.htmlsi=JX58ZzchE4ExixBg
The 2nd answer is that I did this first video quick and dirty to show a comparison to light probe groups, so one of the steps that would force the objects in scene to not bake light maps, setting each game object to use APV for GI, I actually didn’t do here. Meaning if you look at these assets a bit closer, they’re likely still baking a traditional light map for the baked lighting.
does it work for webgl?
APV is not supported by WebGL, it requires features that WebGL is not capable of.
It may be possible for WebGPU to support APV in the future, but it does not currently.
i realize i need to add bloom value to PC_RPAsset in order for it to have emission glow
Great call! Bloom makes the effect quite amazing!
It looks great, but I'm having problems with them and my shaders. Sometimes after baking, one of my shaders created on Amplify shaders stops working and can't seem to find any info about what could be.
Interesting. Does Amplify Shaders operate on the shader graph system where you can poke around and see which nodes could be the culprit? Happy to help in any way, but I've not used Amplify Shaders myself.
It crash when i bake probe
Interesting. Could you try baking the probes in a new scene with one static sphere in it? I would be curious if that bakes fine.
Thanks for this tutorial! I'll try, but i continue to think that Unreal Lumen is better...
I appreciate the feedback and you sharing your thoughts on Lumen. Lumen is an exciting technology and I hope both Unity and Unreal continue doing awesome things in this space to bring the best creation tools to the talented creators out there!
@@Ayres3D In any case thanks for your tutorial :) I'll try!
There are a problem with the implementation. Static object should be contribute global illumination from probe volume/ light probes instead it is set as lightmap. If lightmap is set then it will bake the lightmap and will be slow.
I appreciate the call out!
Appreciate the video as its nice to help, but 50% of it was not about the new feature/ adaptive light probes :P.
That is a totally fair comment. I tried to use the first half explaining the differences between what was the go to strategy versus what it is now. One suggestion I might have is to check out my scenario blending video, which gets further into advanced features of APVs.
ua-cam.com/video/qxXf0jeQnX0/v-deo.htmlsi=TGTRlnB3rvAB170c
Ever figure out how to use APV for a real-time GI time of day system? I remember Unity showing off the URP example of the Asian style level with that implemented. Anyways I'm sure that will be a video that will get a ton of views since I can't find anything about that on YT.
That's a great idea. That scene is one of the 4 URP sample scenes called the Garden. I'll poke around in there and see if I can replicate the time of day system in a future tutorial.
this adaptive probe volume seems like a hack I did in a day to automate placement in a big scene... and it was better because this doesn't auto-merge probes and it will take a lot of memory OR space
Very cool! It would be great to start aggregating future feature ideas for tools like this.
There's actually a pretty major difference between this and light probe groups. The old light probes contribute illumination to the entire object, whereas these are on a per-pixel basis. With the old light probes an object in its entirety would get brighter as it got into a brighter area, even the parts of the objects that weren't actually supposed to be lit. If you had a spotlight for example and a large object, the entire object would get lit, not just the pixels where the spotlight would hit it. These APV probes actually are sampled per-pixel which looks much better, not quite as good but maybe 85%-90% of the quality of lightmaps, something that absolutely can not be said about the old light probe groups.
Too much resolution for 1080 monitor
Thanks for the feedback, I will take a look and dial the settings in better for future videos.
This approach is good for dynamic objects, but on the static walls and floor you can see the quality is unacceptable. In every corner / edge of the room you can see the outside lighting bleeding through because this system seems to have no concept of occlusion. When lighting the indoor walls and floors probes on the outside should be discarded. Without this essential addition the system is no better than the old "light probe proxy volumes". You could say, what about automatic placement? But imo that really does not count. There have been assets doing the same thing for years and it's easy to write yourself. Quality of life is no selling point when the graphical end result is just not good enough. In the end if you want convincing indoor lighting you will have to use lightmaps, same as ever. Unity desperately needs a "it just works" lighting solution and this once again isn't it. The most complete lighting solution we have is still a combination of the DEPRECATED "real-time GI" system and a script that places light probes automatically.
P.S. It's also a shame that all those voxel GI assets never got past an experimental, janky stage. People have been trying for years and years, yet nobody ever made it work properly.
I appreciate your perspective, but feel you're making many assumptions about the light quality of a scene made in 10 minutes to demonstrate a tool. There is a much better representation of APV in the URP sample scenes template in Unity Hub. I'd recommend taking a look at that before drawing too many conclusions, as this video is more intended to show what the feature is and how to set it up, rather than a look at fully deploying the solution and in a polished environment. I am also excited to see what updates come at Unite next week.
@@Ayres3D funny. I actually think of your video as a better representation precisely because it shows the limitations of the technique so clearly. anyone could have covered up the artifacts by making the walls thicker but you didn't. maybe that's an accident but regardless. the video ends up demonstrating exactly what APV can and can't do.
Thanks for the feedback! There are some controls within the tool that'd be worth poking around as well - Such as max and min probe spacing to add more probes or less if needed in certain volumes, probe offsets to customize around unique shapes, etc. For example, virtual offset settings are intended to force invalid probes outside of geometry to eliminate backface hits. There's a lot of cool stuff in here, and I am glad the video was helpful!
@@forasago The GDC talk showed multiple ways to fix light bleeding, you can adjust probes sampling area individually for singular bad probes or use a volume to adjust the sampling location of an area of probes, or invalidate probes. You can adjust how much along a faces normal the sample is taken from as well and how much weight it given to probes based on direction to face normal. Setting up a lighting scenarios properly does take some time, there are reasons that lighting is often an entire separate job in many studios.
They're not light probes auto-placement. They are probes that apply lighting per-pixel.
They a just a cheap/bad alternative to lightmaps. They never said the quality will be better than lightmaps, just that you will not have to wait 6 hours to bake, and can change the time of day.
and prepare yourself because everything else is broken. fact.
Interesting. Are you saying in the probe volumes system or in Unity in general? I’ve been really enjoying the new features in Unity 6!
@@Ayres3D baking usually crashes the editor. the event lightProbesUpdated doesnt fire so you cant use LightProbesQuery. property blocks dont work in meta pass, color vertex channel doesnt work in meta pass
@@Ayres3D we did eventually get it working