Lightprobes

swann

Hi.

So I'm kinda feed up with placing lightprobes by hand. For the rest of my life.

There are couple scripts that allow to place them in aray, but that's still not all what I would like to automate.
If you would create tool for automatic lighprobe placement, what you would expect it to do, beside standard stuff like array placement?

1.  I think taking care of all lighprobes that ended up inside of static models would would be cool.
2. Scatter couple probes on the model, with a small offset away, would be cool to, I think.

What else?

How much lightprobes for realistic scene you usualy place?
1000?
10000?
100000?
more?

I just want to get my goals straight.

Eric Chadwick

The least number possible to get the job done.

It's a difficult problem because you want more probes where there are high frequency lighting changes, like on the edges of light frustums or shadow terminuses. 

Also depends on what height the dynamic objects can go vertically. Need two layers minimum. More if there are big lighting changes. 

So it's kind of open ended.

It's pretty easy to Ctrl D on an array to duplicate. Still tedious though, would be cool to have more tools.

 Have you checked the Asset Store yet?

Lt_Commander

I've been put in charge of probe placement and lighting for my current project - the main issue is that our levels are procedurally generated from tiles and baked, so the issue of hand placing probes goes away and is instead replaced with trying to find the right number of probes for all situations. This becomes an issue when you don't have an idea of where things like windows, doors, and such are going to be until after they're placed. Since we're using enlighten and all lighting is dynamic, any given tile might have a dramatic change in lighting at runtime as well, and most of our level geo is dynamic objects. I did some testing and found that having several hundred in a scene didn't cause as deep a performance impact as I initially expected. Given those results, every tile of about 2x2x3 meters has between 3 and 9 probes at foot, waist, and above head levels. I have plans in place to dial back if needed, but right now, our game hits performance and size budgets with a spider web of probes in place.



Good news is that 5.4 looks like it's going to have auto light probe placement by proxy volume, which should help with large scale placement. I haven't had a chance to dig into the beta, but I may transition to using volume based probe placement if it's found to be a more efficient alternative to hand placement.