Efficient and impactful lighting with Adaptive Probe Volumes | Unity at GDC 2023 

Lighting is one of the complex subjects that a lot don't get right or just don't bother to get right due to its complexity. It would be nice if Unity expanded the Unity Learn section on lighting. Using the new APV system. How to create nice lit scenes from A to Z. From smaller scenes to larger scenes. How to do proper Day / Night cycles. All for URP and HDRP.

4:29 Oh, I was expecting to be an updated tool to probe placement but the per pixel enhancement is very quite nice!

I recently started learning about lighting, and now I understand why it is a separate skill.

long waited content Finally

great talk thank you

I can't find the experimental package in the latest version of Unity. How can I test it?

What version of unity does this actually work in? The probes don't display in all the versions I tried.

after baking my probes are all black. what do I do?

How to make it work with multiscene workflow??

which version of unity ?

Efficient? Not at all, there is no adequate runtime leak prevention tech for APVs. The offline touchup volumes don't do it enough justice in a lot of cases, because there are many scenarios with valid, visible rooms on other sides of the thin enough walls. You're just throwing artefacts from one side to the other, as even visible at 14:31. Plus, for our artists it's a hassle to control these volumes and use debuggers, manipulating the grids of probes feels easier for them. And biasing in itself introduces a lot of caveats as well. A runtime depth-based or visibility-based invalidation of probes is necessary to determine if a probe at a sampling position should be contributing. Though, understandably, that may require a lot of storage (L2 SH needs 27 floats and there are packing optimizations, and now compare that to 64 octahedral depth samples). In fact, you tried to experiment with octahedral depth and even have semi-working lightmapper output support for them, but I imagine you didn't implement it precisely because of the storage concerns, am I correct? Heck, how about just using a rotated cube depth encoding like in TLOU2? It had very sparse hand-placed probes, but APVs can have so much more density and give accurate results, so why even not? Or is it a problem because now you can't do hardware interpolation of the probes in a brick and will require 8 full loads? But other than that, it's a solid tech overall, but runtime leaking prevention is absolutely necessary in order to make it truly useful for us and, I believe, many others.

Lighting Scenarios is not working as advertised and it barely does anything. You cant find examples on how to blend it anywhere.

So can we bake AVP and lightmaps together? Or we only have to choose one of them in one scene?

I try to do this but find out my scene always baking the lightmpat, even when i press the bake button in the probe volume menu.. that's why mine took very long time to bake, didn't find the tutorial how to bake with probe volume only. And after the bake complete, i try to add sphere mesh with hdrp/lit material, then try to moving it around to try if the APV working, but the sphere still look flat all over the room not affected with all the probes, or simply it's just my wrong step.

Background noise of talking people are too loud please aware this

16:20 👍👍👍

Isn't the amount of probes a bit excessive? Would this be inefficient for mobile platforms?

I think light probes could be massively compressed. It is memory bounded, the programmers should know it. Not just memory, it's bad for build sizes.

64 Gb RAM is not enough for bakeing large scenes :(

Why is everyone talking through the presentation?

i don't get 60% of unity user use urp 20% built in and only 10% for hdrp but you work on it move than both of them

Unreal is spitting features after features that is breaking technologies. Unity is needlessly trying to compete with them which they will miserably fail. At least be master at what you good at. Please work on 2d features where unreal can never compete. 2d lighting and shadows, their performances and technologies related to 2d that where you should directionally focus. Also don't forget that your user base are indie. Give features that will benefit indie teams. Indie developers are somewhere forgotten in the dust it seems. Please work on engine features that already need to be polished. Am i wrong please correct me.

This is NOT efficient! I rather have control of my probe placement and i will know what probes are affecting what in the scene. This feels like a replacement for an ACTUAL GI system, which you STILL need for your scenes