Terrain lighting weird, dark/underexposed/overexposed? HDRP in Unity 2023.1.8f1

[neurodr0me]

First and foremost, my understanding of your post on Versions and Render Pipelines suggests that 2023.1.8f1 is a "tech stream" release (being neither beta/alpha nor LTS), for which you describe your support as "We do our best".

So I understand that issues are to be expected here, and am not expecting a rapid resolution here. Gaia and Gena both work flawlessly (so far?) in this version of Unity, though, so if it *is* possible to resolve the issues for GTS I'd prefer to work in this newer version. I'm hoping there's something simple to fix this issue, but if not, I understand completely! Keep up the good work!

Anyways, the issue:

Here is the terrain with normal shaders. The ocean is using the HDRP Water system built-in to Unity, by the way.

Here is the terrain with GTS enabled. The effect is hard to describe. The terrain acts like you are looking into a very dark room from outside during a bright day. So it starts out very very dark, but as you stand still, there's a sort of "eyes adjusting to the light "effect where it gets a little more visible. Then as the camera moves, this 'resets' to dark and then brightens again rapidly.

 

Finally, I'm also getting some console errors when I open the GTS Manager, however I don't think they are related to or affecting this behavior since it's just missing icons.

[neurodr0me]

Here is a (poor) attempt at recording the effect:

I think it's related to the position of the sun? The terrain seems to be lighter the less you are pointed at the sun.

By the way, the water is now turned off here, and the effect persists, so the water doesn't seem to be related.

EDIT: Another note, every other feature of GTS seems to be working perfectly. The various filters and stuff are all applying to the terrain. Only the lighting is at issue. This is why I'm hoping it's just one line in a shader somewhere that needs to get tweaked 😅

[neurodr0me]

🤔 I went looking for settings that might be responsible for this--my first thought was maybe some kind of HDR effect going on?

Instead, I found that turning off "Light Layers" seems to fix this issue!

I don't even know what Light Layers are 🤷‍♂️ So I'll just leave it off for now.

Okay I just looked Light Layers up. It's a way to isolate lights to specific meshes. So I'm guessing the Sun is not affecting the terrain mesh--but only while GTS is applied? 🤔

Hope this helps someone with the same issue, or helps you guys tackle the issue!

[Bryan]

Thank you for sharing your findings and solution.