How to Fix Emissive Light Not Baking Because the Material Is Not Marked Baked Emissive

An emissive surface can glow without lighting anything because the emission GI flag is off. Setting the material's emission GI to Baked and rebaking lets that glow contribute real indirect light.

How to fix it

1. Set emission GI to Baked

On the material's Emission section, change the Global Illumination dropdown from None to Baked. None means the emission is purely a shader color with no GI contribution.

2. Make the object a GI contributor

Mark the emissive mesh as Contribute GI / static so the lightmapper includes it as an emissive source in the bake.

3. Give it real emission strength

Raise the emission color's HDR intensity; weak emission contributes negligible bounce even when the GI flag is correct.

4. Clear and rebake

Clear baked data and rebake so the emissive contribution is computed into the lightmap; emission GI is captured only at bake time.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.