Baked shadwing broken

đŸŒ” Needle Engine
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1

Hi folks,
we’ve had quite a few bugs and problems working on our 1st big’ish Unity/Needle project and i will report some of them that are directly related to needle once i’ve found the time to document them properly (were on tight schedule and heavy crunch rn) 
 anyways 


Today out of the blue all of our scenes (3 in total) became seemingly much brighter, nobody touched anything, we were only testing some timeline functionalities and some shaders on some meshes because we’ve had problems reliably changing material colors via the timeline.

After some inspection we found that the general scene lighting (baked shadows in unity, no real time lighting) has changed drastically, baked shadows are either barely visible or not visible at all.
Also contrasts at some materials look very odd.

(there is a slight chance todays Needle Update caused this, but problems are sometimes so random that its hard to tell)

Since im only allowed to post one image 
 here is an example plus the lighting settings of one of our scenes (compare the trees)

image
image1920×1649 215 KB

Almost everything in this scene is static with custom UV-Channels for Unity Light-/AO-baking and like i said this happened out of the blue and we cant recall touching/changing anything affecting scene lighting or project settings. We’ve rebaked and tested lighting multiple times, it looks as intended in Unity but is completely broken in the exported project
all levels.

Any Idea what could cause this or what i could check to maybe find the cause?
Greetings

2

Hi Aeleks, thanks for sharing your issue. Baked lighting and shadows in exported Needle projects rely on several factors being set up just right. Here are a few suggestions you might want to check:

‱ Ensure your lightmap assets are correctly exported and assigned. Sometimes if lightmap references get lost or overwritten—maybe due to timeline or shader changes—the baked shadows can appear overly faint or disappear entirely.

‱ Double-check your light and renderer settings in Unity. Make sure your lights are set to “Baked” (or “Realtime” if that’s what you intend) and that your MeshRenderer components have “Cast Shadows” enabled. As our FAQ notes, for directional lights the actual position matters since the shadow camera is positioned relative to the light (docs/faq.html).

‱ If you’re using custom shaders (or materials adjusted via timeline), verify that they are compatible with the exported lightmapping. Custom unlit shaders, for example, may not support shadow receiving properly unless they’re set up to do so, and timeline modifications might be inadvertently affecting material properties.

‱ Confirm your project’s color space is set to Linear, as incorrect color space settings can also make scenes look brighter and affect the perceived intensity of shadows.

‱ Finally, if you recently updated Needle Engine, it’s possible that a regression or change in export might have influenced these aspects. Re-baking your lighting in Unity and then re-exporting can sometimes resolve unexpected brightness issues.

If none of these tips help narrow down the issue, I’d recommend creating a minimal reproducible example (using Needle-engine - Vite Template - StackBlitz) and consider filing a bug report via the Unity “Needle Engine/Report a bug” menu option. That way, our team can dive into the specifics of your setup.

Hope this helps, and feel free to share further details if you need more assistance!

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3

Hi,

  1. Could you share a live url (visa PM) and send a bugreport (menu item: Needle Engine/Report a bug) with the scene?

  2. Please share which Needle Engine version you used previously and which version you’re on right now

  3. Please check the browser’s console (F12 in chrome) to see if there are any messages.

  4. After everything above try down-grading the Needle Engine package again in Unity via Unity’s PackageManager to verify that the issue only happens in the new version or is perhaps unrelated to the update.

I’d also love to learn more about what bugs/problems you had (we’ve had quite a few bugs and problems working on our 1st big’ish Unity/Needle project) since I don’t recall receiving a message or report from you before. Would be happy to understand whats going on and improve.

4

Thank you for the Quick reply!

Uhm, so i was about to check the things you were suggesting and saw that there was another Needle Update today (Unity 6 6000.0.52f btw; used Needle 4.9.1 earlier today were said stuff was broken, now updated to 4.9.2) and now everything seems to work again 
 don’t know if this is directly related, but im very glad everything is back to normal again! Checked all three Levels/Scenes and the lighting is back to normal again :slight_smile:

Sadly cant share live URL (yet) since this is a actively in development company/work project (evaluating Needle next to other things), but i would definetly use the report bug feature next time we face such a 
 big problem.

Regarding reporting other Bugs, like i said, were under heavy chrunch at the moment trying to reach a very tight deadline. But one bug that seems to be on Needles side of things i can share quickly


We arent able to correctly export materials/meshes that use a specific UV-Channel with/to Needle.

Like the Image shows, the texture in the material is assigned to be mapped to UV-Channel “1” of the mesh (which is technically uv-channel “2”, since these start at “0” in Unity). It works in Unity, but on export Needle seems to use the 1st UV-Channel (“0” in Unity) of the Mesh to map this texture instead. Hope this is easy to fix.

image
image1920×960 128 KB

Kind regards, i will open new tickets regarding other bugs/issues soonℱ <3

5

Thanks, please share any issues you’re facing with us here so we can take a look and provide help! :slight_smile:

I’ll share the uv2 bug internally that you just reported and let you know tomorrow if we can reproduce (or if it’s a known issue and maybe already have a fix).

Otherwise glad to hear the update fixed your issue!

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6

Hi again,

So the issue is that the UnityGLTF inspector for Unlit material does show you the MapUV option but only exports it when ‘Texture Transforms’ is enabled. It’s a bug in the inspector/exporter.

Please enable the TextureTransforms toggle and it should work as expected.

image
image449×251 13.7 KB

We’ll also look into improving this in UnityGLTF (since we’re also maintaining that OSS project)

Note: It will be fixed in the next Needle Engine package update (we just publihed a fix in UnityGLTF)

1 Like
7

Thank you, that worked <3