Unity Lighting

Unity Lighting is a crucial part of Unity Rendering

Introduction to Unity Lighting

Why is lighting important?

1. Visibility
2. Makes the game believable
3. Communicates mood
4. Level design tool, like direction

Unity Project Lightning Settings

On the highest level, you have the Player settings for lighting, which consists of the following:

Project Settings - Player

Rendering - Color Space

Currently, there are 2 options for Color space, namely:

1. Linear
2. Gamma

Scene Lightning Settings

The next level is per scene lighting.

A scene’s lighting is affected by multiple factors.

Enlighten = Realtime

Baking = Static lights

Progressive Lightmapper = baked

URP Settings

Lighting:

• Shadow resolution - changes the quality of the shadows

Shadows:

*

Skyboxes

Custom Skybox

Lights

Directional lights

Directional lights are mostly used to act as the Sun.

How to guides

How to make a Unity scene completely dark

• Delete all light sources in the scene
• Delete all light probes
• Delete all reflection probes
• Delete all volumes
• Window - Lightning - Scene:
  • Clear Baked Data
  • Untick Realtime Lighting
  • Untick Baked Global Illumination
  • Delete Lighting settings references or create a new Lighting Settings file
• Window - Lightning - Environment:
  • Remove Skybox Material
  • Change Ambient Color to pitch black
  • Untick Fog

How to light an external scene in Unity URP

• Starting with an dark scene (see above)
• Add a directional light, which will act as the sun
• Rotate the directional light, to get the desired results you are going for.

How to setup a static scene with Progressive Lightmapper

Remove any lights in the scene
Make a material with emissive checked.
Make everything static that needs to be static
Remove skybox
Change ambient color to black
Disable Real Time Global Illumination

Courses

• Pluralsight

• Cert Prep: Unity Certified Associate Game Developer Materials and Lighting

Unity Lighting Assets and Packages

Unity Warehouse environment

References

Unity Lighting

• The basics of lighting in Unity

Unity Color Spaces

• GAMMA AND LINEAR SPACE - WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW THEY DIFFER
• Color Space
• sRGB

Unity URP and HDRP References

• Brackeys - LIGHTING in Unity
• HDRP vs. URP - Which Unity Template should you choose?
• Exterior Lighting in URP | Unity 2021.2 Updated Workflow

Unity Standard Rendering

• Unity High Quality Lighting Tutorial - Part 1
• Unity High Quality Lighting Tutorial - Part 2
• Unity High Quality Lighting Tutorial - Part 3
• Enhancing your Unity Mobile Games - Unite Europe 2015
• Unity 5 Tutorial - Basic Glass with the Standard Shader
• Unity Realtime Global Illumination and Translucency
• How to - Lighting scenes in unity