Unity lighting and probes
Explains Unity lighting differences by separating direct light, baked light, probes and reflections. Adjusts supported settings from a controlled comparison instead of increasing every quality value.
unity-lighting-probe-volumes
Agents using this skill
When is it useful?
Use it when dynamic objects disagree with their surroundings, light leaks appear or shadow quality exceeds the performance budget.
What does it help you do?
- Separates direct, indirect, probe and reflection contributions.
- Checks pipeline support, bake inputs and probe validity.
- Diagnoses leaks and shadow cost before increasing resolutions.
Try asking this
A moving Unity character becomes unnaturally bright when entering a dark doorway. Compare direct illumination, probe sampling and reflections in a small test scene. Check the active pipeline and bake inputs, then verify the fix from both sides of the doorway without an unexplained increase in shadow or lighting cost.
Detailed documentation
Read the skill’s original instructions, examples and checks in their authored language.
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Lighting, GI and Probe Volumes
Inspect the installed pipeline/version, active quality asset, color space, tone mapping, lighting mode and target hardware. Define a reference camera and a repeatable exposure/look before compensating with more lights.
- Separate direct light, baked indirect light, probe-lit dynamic objects, reflections and post-processing when tracing a mismatch. Compare the same camera, time of day and exposure.
- Choose baked, mixed or real-time contributions according to motion and performance needs. Verify lightmap UVs, contributing renderers, scale and bake settings before increasing texture resolution.
- Check Adaptive Probe Volume support in the actual pipeline/renderer and quality settings. Configure the relevant baking set, scene participation, probe placement/density and renderer sampling using version-matched tools.
- Diagnose leaks through geometry thickness, probe validity/placement, bias and dilation before hiding them with a global intensity reduction. Check moving objects through doors and across scene boundaries.
- Place reflection probes for their spatial influence and verify box projection, blending and importance where supported. A reflection problem is not automatically a diffuse GI problem.
- Tune shadow distance/cascades and the actual screen-space need before raising atlas resolution. Profile extra lights, shadow casters, bandwidth and memory on the intended quality tiers.
- Preserve reproducible bake inputs and authored scene settings. Do not change all project lighting or quality assets to repair a single local material.
Verify indoor/outdoor transitions, static and moving objects, representative materials, camera distances and all supported quality tiers. Report bake/build evidence separately from visual approval.
Reference: Adaptive Probe Volumes in URP; pipeline support and controls are version dependent.
Included files 2
LICENSE.txtSKILL.md