Block/mask light

[Jexx]

Hi,

I'm trying to understand lighting in VAM, and I'd like someone to confirm something. Let say we have a two room asset, with no light on it's totally dark (black screen), you create and point a light at the adjoining wall in room A, room B should be dark as there is no light, but instead, Room B is lit as if there is no wall. Is there a way to stop this when making assets, "block" the light in VAM, or is this just a limitation of VAM?

Thanks

Edit: If I turn Shadow Strength up to max I get the desired/expected result, but shadows are then solid and ugly. I assume this whole issue is a limitation of how shadows are done in VAM?

 

[hazmhox]

Seeing your shot there might be several reasons why :

• The enviro might not be crafted properly and geometry/topo does not prevent light from being blocked properly AND on top of that might have not been built with the NGSS plugin in Unity.
• You don't know how to properly use lights and are using them far too extremely

This below, is almost a default light in the cyberpunk enviro, it works nicely and without overshooting the shadows strength. (click to zoom in).

If you need any help, tell me what you don't know and eventually what enviro you're using.
Cheers.

 

[Jexx]

Thanks Hazmhox, the example I used was extreme, but that was to demonstrated the issue.

The image you have done shows light coming in through a door way, which is different, and I'm fine with.
I have created a simple example to show the issue.

If you go inside the box and then turn off the external lights the box will go dark (light 1 and 2) and all you can see are the lights on the car. Interestingly if light 3 is off when the external lights are on, the box also goes dark but the settings on light 3 are so low it's not enough to light anything. So I'm pretty sure now that this is a VAM/Unity issue.

 

[hazmhox]

If you go inside the box and then turn off the external lights the box will go dark (light 1 and 2) and all you can see are the lights on the car. Interestingly if light 3 is off when the external lights are on, the box also goes dark but the settings on light 3 are so low it's not enough to light anything. So I'm pretty sure now that this is a VAM/Unity issue.

I don't really understand what you're trying to achieve (or explain).

If I'm loading your scene this is what I'm getting :

• All invisible lights are on
• If I go inside the cube it's pitch black
• It does not change anything if I either enable or disable the light 1 and 2 while in the box
• Light 3 is pretty much useless as either the intensity or range will not light anything

So you might want to show me your result through a video and/or explain your goal. Because that scene behaves perfectly normally for me. Outside light source don't light the inside of your box. Internal light does not light anything outside of it if you tweak the settings properly and not leave the default as you have in your test.json.

The image you have done shows light coming in through a door way, which is different, and I'm fine with.

It's not

Just move inside the bathroom and you have the exact same situation as your original shot lol

 

[Jexx]

In my first image the light is on the other side of the wall where the sink is, in another room, so it's not coming in through the door, its coming through the wall, I had the light selected so you can see where it was (but didn't mention before).

Looks like there were two issues with my test environment, one was the Pixel Light Count being 1 for some reason, the other was the second light in scene was set to auto not pixel, this combination causes the image attached. Set all lights to Pixel and it's dark in the box. Sorry that test ended up being a waste of your time and instead highlighted a different issue (which I'm not worried about).

Further testing now seems to looks like an asset issue, I get different results depending on the asset, although it hard finding assets that don't have lighting baked in for testing

I'll do a video of the asset I'm having issues with tomorrow, hopefully you can point me in the right direction.

You said about the NGSS plugin in Unity, I'll have to look at that, I thought it was only used while viewing in Unity, rather than affecting exported asset bundle files.

 

[hazmhox]

I was suspecting a pixel light count issue indeed. Let it at 6.

Most assets don't have light baked (if you're talking about "assets" and not enviros)... and also most enviros don't have light baked either (because not a lot of people know how to actually properly bake )

You said about the NGSS plugin in Unity, I'll have to look at that, I thought it was only used while viewing in Unity, rather than affecting exported asset bundle files.

There's a chapter at the end talking about the shadows

The definitive asset creation tutorial for VaM - Guides -

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