3D Environments and Lighting in Unity

Playing around in Unity with materials, color, and textures, it amazes me how easily a developer can change things on the fly to suite their needs. Some color changes here, some texture mapping there, bam new fresh look! Of course you need good artists to make fancy textures if you need those however.

Lighting is also amazing and there are just too many types to talk about, however the ones that definitely stand out are emissions and light probes.

Emissions are great as they will produce their own light disjointed from the the environment light. They are so called “baked” into a mapping file and the program will read it to create separate light for it just like this illuminated case.

Even skyboxes actually on the fly illuminate your scene (or you can set a global illumination color)!

However light probes are the biggest star of the show. They take quite a bit of time but these premade lighting webs can illuminate a scene extremely efficiently, and they work wonders!

Although I will not be going too deep into this subject for now, I can see myself getting lost in this as I dig deeper into Unity. The material and lighting world in Unity is just that, a whole another world of amazing things that the program can do and I look forward to the day I learn more.

See you next post!