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Why does the emissive material not work on the surrounding objects?
I have made a material texture with an emission property. However, when I put it on a cube, it does not update the surrounding as if the cube was not actually a light source. I would like to make it so that the cube actually emits light, like it is supposed. My lighting is automatically built, and here is a screenshot of what happens after it is built.
Answer by Cherno · Jun 15, 2015 at 01:06 PM
The so-called "Realtime Global Illumination" isn't truly real-time. You can't create objects at runtime which have an emissie material and have them light up surrounding objects. This limiation is explained in the User Manual for GI.
Answer by $$anonymous$$ · Oct 25, 2016 at 08:16 PM
My reading of the doc suggests that emission can be treated as a light source during GI calcs (even though it sadly does not work for me either, in Unity 5.4):
"... the Emission parameter has a Global Illumination setting, allowing you to specify how the apparent light emitted from this material will affect the contextual lighting of other nearby objects. There are three options
None - The object will appear emissive, but the lighting of nearby objects will not be affected. Realtime - The emissive light from this material will be added to the realtime global illumination calculations for the scene, so the lighting of nearby objects, even moving objects, will be affected by the emitted light. Baked - The emissive light from this material will be baked into the static lightmaps for the scene, so other nearby static objects will appear to be lit by this material, but dynamic objects will not be affected."
Answer by terresquall · Apr 01, 2020 at 02:24 PM
If you're still looking for an answer, there are a lot of conditions to meet for emissive lighting to affect their surroundings properly: your GameObjects need to be marked static, and a few of the material's emission properties have to be set up right. If you want realtime emission lighting (that's possible too), you have to write a bit of script too. I've written a guide on emission lighting that covers all of this: https://blog.terresquall.com/2020/01/getting-your-emission-maps-to-work-in-unity/