Introduction

Manual for v1.95.4

Unity light probes are an important part of every scene. It provide the transmission of direct, indirect and reflected light from light sources in mixed and baked modes to dynamic objects. The accuracy of lighting dynamic objects on the scene largely depends on how correctly the light probes are placed.

Learn more in the docs or, if you prefer, this video tutorial.

Magic Light Probes is an editor extension that is designed to help you arrange your light probes in the automatic mode as quickly and correctly as possible.

This tool can guarantee that:

  • No probes will be located inside the geometry, no matter how complex it is, convex or concave. This is very important, because even in the simplest case of manually arranging probes by simple duplication, you will inevitably encounter probes within the geometry.

  • With high accuracy, light probes will be installed at corners and intersections of the geometry. In corners, as a rule, the light intensity is lower, therefore, in order to properly illuminate a dynamic object when approaching such places, it is necessary to install probes there.

  • Depending on the settings, the system will try to place the probes in the most contrasting places (errors are not excluded)

  • It is guaranteed to be pretty fast in most cases

Comparison of manual and automatic placement using Magic Light Probes

Multivolume workflow

Large and complex scenes can be divided into separate volumes. You can customize each volume individually, and also exclude some light sources from the calculation in volumes in which they will not have any effect.

Multithreading and GPU acceleration

Although multithreading cannot be applied universally in Unity, there are still places where it is actively used. In most cases, this is work with large arrays.

In some calculation passes, GPU acceleration (compute shaders) is used. It's very fast. This brings maximum benefit during the setup of the already calculated volume.

Compute shaders for Mac OS work only in Metal Render mode, OpenGL is not supported.

Debug mode

Volume calculation takes place in several passes and each of these passes you can configure separately using the debug mode.

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