One aspect that becomes more important as lighting is optimised, is the Indirect Multiplier options on each light. — Today’s Objective: Look into how the Indirect Multiplier option on lights can be used to improve and increase the effects of performance-balanced lighting. More Light, Less Lights: When your aim is to optimize your lighting to be more performant, minimising the number of lights is an easy solution. But that can easily mean your…

HD game development is often pushing the limits of current technology, and solutions need to be optimised effectively. — Today’s Objective: Explore how a Unity developer can understand how light baking works, the costs it involves, and how to balance performance with quality effectively. Static Baked Lighting: When using Baked Lighting in Unity, it is a requirement that all objects to be affected by the baked lighting be GI Static themselves (except…

Post Processing is incredibly useful, but not all areas should look the same. Use a different profile for each area for different effects! — Today’s Objective: Use multiple Post-Processing Profiles and Volumes to create different areas with different Post-Processing effects in play. Post-Processing Profiles and Volumes: I’ve covered setting up Post-Processing before, and how you mush create a Post-Processing Profile asset, where the effect details are saved.

SSR is one of the best methods to accurately reflect your digital environment, but what makes it special and worth using? — Today’s Objective: Look at Screen Space Reflections in Unity, and how and why they are a great high-quality solution for accurate reflections. What are Screen Space Reflections (SSR)? Screen Space Reflections are a technique for reusing screen space data to calculate reflections.

Yesterday, I touched on how to bake lighting data. Today I will explain the different lighting modes a bit more specifically. — Today’s Objective: Explain the 3 types of lighting modes available in Unity, and the situations they work best in. Realtime Lighting Mode: The default of most lights, Realtime lighting is when the lighting effects, like illumination and shadows, are recalculated every frame, leading to accurate lighting but increased processing during runtime.

Often when working on Unity projects, you will want to use “baked” lighting, for any number of reasons. This is how. — Today’s Objective: Show you how you can use baked lighting data to improve the lighting and visuals in your Unity scene easily. Baked Lighting: “Baked” Lighting, as opposed to “Realtime” Lighting, is a lighting method in which the shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and other lighting details of “Static” (non-moving) shadow-casting objects are “baked”…

Cookies (not the edible or browser kind) allow textures to be overlayed over lights in the Unity scene, to create useful visuals. Today’s Objective: Set up and use cookies to improve the lighting of my game scene and make it look more realistic. Cookies in Unity and Game Development: Cookie is a term used for a…

Today I will use Light Layers in Unity HDRP to improve control over scene lighting and atmosphere. — Today’s Objective: Explore the capabilities and benefits of Light Layers in Unity HDRP. What are Light layers? There are times in game development when you want things like lights or probes to only affect certain other things like objects or surfaces. In the case of lighting, Light Layers is one method to better control…