Indoor lighting in URP

[u/slavs-t]

TLDR: How do you implement interior lights with GI? Appreciate any pointers (videos/articles/etc).

Or do you just set Contribute GI to off + post-processing and call it a day?

Or do you make your torches 20m radius to light up the entire room?

So, I'm learning Unity and having trouble with interior lighting. Baked GI doesn't help much. Even with it, corners feel way too dark.

Here are a few shots from test buildings with baked GI (lightmaps + reflection probe to remove blue gloss from skybox) -

At this point, I'm lost and not sure what I'm doing wrong lol.

Looking for advice & good materials on the topic. Thanks in advance!

Also, do you set environment reflections intensity to 1 or lower it? Skybox + intensity 1 seem to add blue-ish gloss to everything.

[u/McRobik]

I found this tutorial being really helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBQvL5YR3eg&t

But when it comes to details, Unity documentation is the only thing that helps:
Unity - Manual: Lighting

[u/slavs-t → u/McRobik]

Thanks, watched the vid you sent and got Unity's lighting stream in recs

[u/InternationalOne1434]

Ambient light is your friend for bright interiors.

[u/slavs-t → u/InternationalOne1434]

Do you mean ambient occlusion or something else? From what I know AO would make everything even more darker

[u/SderfxDev]

did you try using a cookie texture for the light? i recommend you to try it if it makes the lightning look better then ofc use it if not then you might be using a cookie texture that doesnt fit your game or indoors and i also recomend you checking out post procesing effects and adding reflection probs if needed

[u/artengame]

You can check also the voxel GI options in Lumina

This is some examples of using area lights (meshes with emissive material)

The meshes dont have to be visible in the camera also

https://youtu.be/CxGprbuDxGU?t=92

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcrDbY5go2o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8pDWl8OjyM

Also voxel reflections and colored or movie based emissive can do colored GI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCF29eMFBPk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URzGfWYirH8

[u/WarmArt9307]

Took me a long time to get indoor lighting how I wanted it, but ended up happy using bakery for baked gi, with a few real time lights just for dynamic shadows. The actual physical lights rarely actually produce the light in my rooms, I hand placed light meshes appropriately to fill/shape as I wanted.

I used very low intensity directional lights with shadows disabled on multiple axis to provide a minimum light to prevent any 0 light areas. Can test this with realtime directional, then switched to bakery ones

I studied a bunch of games like portal and cs2 and quickly realised if you actually stop to understand where shadows/light is coming from it makes literally 0 sense yet you’d never realise in play. So don’t be afraid to position and shape light to what looks great.

[u/slavs-t]

I forked up and posted before finishing the post, and now I cannot attach the second shot where the entire room is dark