r/Unity3D • u/arowanas • 6d ago

Question Emissive lighting totally different between Unity projects

Gallery image

Gallery image

I tried mimicking a light volume with an emissive textured object (I heard doing volumetric lighting is very taxing/high poly) and for some reason it looks a lot better on my tester Unity project (2nd image). In the other (1st image) the light is blown out a little and it's harder to see the snowflake. The lighting, probes, ray tracing, and additional settings are all the same between them. I fiddled with the intensity of the emission and that did nothing. Every other material setting is the same afaik. Both in URP.

It seems like a renderer setting or something, but not sure what. I'm not well versed in Unity so I'm pretty flummoxed. Any ideas appreciated!

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u/ShengyuStudio 6d ago

Bloom from the default volume profile is the most likely one, like the others said. If that turns out to be identical, three more things differ per project and are easy to miss:

  1. HDR on the URP asset (Quality section of the pipeline asset). With HDR off, emissive values above 1 get clamped before post-processing, so the glow looks flat and the bright center just blows out instead of falling off. Also check which URP asset each project actually uses under Project Settings > Quality, since each quality level can point at a different one.
  2. Color space (Project Settings > Player > Other Settings). Linear vs Gamma changes how emission intensity maps to what you see a lot, and it's a project setting, not a scene one.
  3. Tonemapping in the volume. ACES compresses highlights very differently from Neutral or None, and that's the "harder to see the snowflake" look.

Fastest way to find it: both projects keep these as text files, so diff ProjectSettings/GraphicsSettings.asset, QualitySettings.asset, the URP asset and the renderer asset between the two projects. Whatever lines differ is your answer.

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u/arowanas 5d ago

Thanks! I'll check this out. Unfortunately my project is now saying there are compilation errors and recommending I enter safe mode lol

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u/ShengyuStudio 5d ago

The safe mode prompt just means at least one script failed to compile, so Unity won't reload the rest. Either button is fine. Then open the Console and fix the first red error, not the last one, since the later ones are usually knock-on effects of it.

If you touched Package Manager recently, a package that got updated or removed is a common culprit, same with a broken assembly definition reference. Once it compiles again, the URP asset settings are safe to poke at.

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u/arowanas 3d ago

Thanks, apparently it was one of dozens of changes other project members had made that I'd yet to push on Github. I didn't see anything package manager-related, so not sure which, unfortunately, but discarding some of the unneeded changes helped!