GI visualizations in the Scene view

The Scene viewAn interactive view into the world you are creating. You use the Scene View to select and position scenery, characters, cameras, lights, and all other types of Game Object. More info
See in Glossary has a number of Draw Modes to help you visualize different aspects of the SceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary’s content. Among these are a set of modes to let you see exactly how global illumination (GI) is affecting your Scene. This page goes into more detail about the visualisation modes that are most relevant to GI.

Note that, in the Lighting window, the ObjectThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info
See in Glossary tab displays some of the different modes for the selected GameObject, with its UV channel rendered in Texture space as a wireframe MeshThe main graphics primitive of Unity. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. Unity supports triangulated or Quadrangulated polygon meshes. Nurbs, Nurms, Subdiv surfaces must be converted to polygons. More info
See in Glossary. Tick the Show Lightmap__ Resolution__ checkbox to apply a checkerboard texture on top of each view, scaled to show the resolution.

GI visualizations are not designed to work in Play Mode.

Shading Mode

Shaded

The default Shading Mode is Shaded. This shows the Scene fully lit according to the current lighting setup.

Global Illumination

Systems

The precompute stage will automatically subdivide the scene into systems (i.e. groups of objects sharing the same realtime lightmap) based on proximity and Lightmap Parameters. This is done to allow multithreading and optimizations when updating indirect lighting. This visualization shows the systems with different colors.

Clustering

This shows the clusters that EnlightenThe lighting system by Geomerics used in Unity for computing global illumination (GI). More info
See in Glossary generates from the lightmap static geometry. Enlighten calculates indirect lighting using clusters that are generated in the Clustering step. Resulting clusters should be larger than lightmap texels (the ratio is controlled by the Cluster Resolution parameter in Lightmap Parameters. The step where geometry is converted to clusters can be quite memory intensive if the scale isn’t set correctly. If you are seeing high memory usage or long baking times it could be because the static geometry in your scene is getting cut up into many more clusters than what is actually needed. The clustering scene view mode can help you identify the geometry that needs to have UVs or Realtime Resolution tweaked.

Lit Clustering

Those are the same clusters as seen in the Clustering view, but with realtime GI applied.

UV Charts

This shows the optimized UV layout used when calculating precomputed realtime GI. It is automatically generated during the precompute process. It is available as soon as the Instance precompute stage is completed. The UV Charts scene view mode can help you identify the geometry that needs to have UVs or scale adjusted (use the Resolution parameter in Lightmap Parameters to change scale). This view is also useful when adjusting the Realtime Resolution. Each chart has a different color.

Realtime Global Illumination

Albedo

This shows the albedo used when calculating GI. The albedo is generated from the material information and can be customized fully by adding a custom meta pass. The checkered overlay shows the resolution of the albedo texture that is passed to Enlighten.

Emissive

Shows the emission used when calculating the GI. It is generated from the material information and can be fully customized by adding a custom meta pass. The checkered overlay shows the resolution of the emission texture that is passed into Enlighten.

Indirect

This shows the indirect lighting only (the contents of realtime GI lightmaps generated by Enlighten). The checkered overlay shows the resolution of the irradiance texture. If Realtime GI is disabled, this view mode isn’t selectable.

Directionality

This view shows the most dominant light direction vector. Please refer to the Directional Lightmapping page for more info. The checkered overlay shows the resolution of the directionality texture.

Baked Global Illumination

Baked Lightmap

This shows the baked lightmaps applied to the scene geometry. The checkered overlay shows the baked lightmap resolution.

Shadowmask

This displays the shadowmaskA Texture that shares the same UV layout and resolution with its corresponding lightmap. More info
See in Glossary texture occlusion values. It colors the mesh and the light gizmoA graphic overlay associated with a GameObject in a Scene, and displayed in the Scene View. Built-in scene tools such as the move tool are Gizmos, and you can create custom Gizmos using textures or scripting. Some Gizmos are only drawn when the GameObject is selected, while other Gizmos are drawn by the Editor regardless of which GameObjects are selected. More info
See in Glossary in the same color so one can verify that the light occlusion factors have been baked as expected.

Texel Validity

This mode shows which texels are marked invalid because they mostly “see” backfaces. During lightmap baking, Unity emits rays from each texel. If a significant portion of a texel’s rays are hitting backface geometry, this texel is marked invalid. This is because the texel should not be able to see the backfaces in the first place. Unity handles this by replacing invalid texels with valid neighbors. You can adjust this behaviour using the Backface Tolerance parameter (LightmapParameters > General GI).

UV Overlap

If lightmap charts are too close together in UV space, the pixelThe smallest unit in a computer image. Pixel size depends on your screen resolution. Pixel lighting is calculated at every screen pixel. More info
See in Glossary values inside them might bleed into one another when the lightmap is sampled by the GPU. This can lead to unexpected artifacts. This mode allows you to identify texels that are too close to texels in other charts. This is useful when you want to troubleshoot your UV issues.

Light Overlap

This mode allows you to see if all static lights have been baked to the shadowmask. If an area of the level is lit by more than four static lights, the exceeding lights will fallback to fully baked and be displayed in red. Relevant for this calculation is not the actual lit surface, but the intersection of the light sources’ volumes. So even though in the screenshot below it looks as if the colored spots on the mesh do not overlap, the cones of the four spotlights end up overlapping below the ground plane along with the directional light.

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• 2018–03–28 Page amended with limited editorial review

• Updated in 5.6

• Updated in 2018.1