This week, we’ll show you 12 of the most useful tutorials on how to set up lighting in Unity projects.
Quality lighting is half of a project’s success: after all, no one can appreciate your amazing assets if they can’t see them. These 10 tutorials will show you how to work with lights in Unity.
Table of Contents LIGHTING IN Unity
UNITY LIGHTing BASICS
If you’re just starting to model or create games, you should check out this tutorial by Daniel Stringer, where he explains the different types of lights: directional, point, spot, and area lights. He also talks about emission materials.
MASTERING UNITY LIGHTING SETTINGS & PERFORMANCE
Now that you know what you’re working with, it’s helpful to learn about lighting settings. In this video, Game Dev Republic game industry professionals explain how real-time lighting, baked lighting, and mixed lighting work and share other useful information.
HOW TO BUILD LIGHTMAPS IN UNITY 2020
Then it’s time to talk about lightmapping, the process of pre-calculating the brightness of surfaces and saving the result in a texture. There’s no better source to learn about this than the official Unity channel.
BASICS OF LIGHTMAPPING
Here’s another useful video about lightmapping – this time, from UGuruz. It starts by explaining why we need to make lights and goes on to show how to do it, how to create lightmap UVs and how to optimize lighting for mobile games.
LIGHTING IN UNITY
It’s not the nicest tutorial, but it’s very understandable and easy to follow. Brackeys has left YouTube, but his videos continue to help Unity users with their simplicity. Here, he shows how to use Unity’s Progressive Lightmapper and explains Global Illumination and baking along the way.
HIGH QUALITY LIGHTING USING LIGHT PROBES in UNITY
Another video from Brackeys shows how to use Light Probes to store lighting information and make sure your animated objects are properly lit.
INTERIOR LIGHTING IN UNITY URP ( UNIVERSAL RENDER PIPELINE)
Unity uses the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). Simply put, it’s a battle between rendering and quality, with URP being more universal and HDRP targeting high definition hardware and photorealism.
In the following tutorial, internal lighting in URP and post-processing settings.
EXTERIOR LIGHTING IN HDRP IN UNITY
Conversely, in this tutorial, the same artist shows how to work with external lighting, this time in HDPR. He demonstrates how to add a glare detector, effects and fog.
LIGHTING AND POST-PROCESSING LOW POLY SCENE
Next tutorial focuses on how to work with lighting and post-processing in a low-complexity scene. The tutorial is quite simple and has subtitles to make it even easier to follow the instructions.
REALISTIC LIGHTING IN UNITY
Another change of pace: let’s go from a low complexity scene to a realistic scene. Sam Dogantimur, CEO and host of Sykoo, shows how important the right lighting is, especially for a realistic environment.
Step into the famous Sponza Atrium to see how to beautifully light an environment from scratch using a mix of baked and real-time techniques. Pierre Yves will showcase the GPU Lightmapper, the new Probe Volume system, ray tracing, and path tracing.
4 TECHNIQUE TO LIGHT ENVIRONMENTS IN UNITY
If you are in a hurry to learn more than getting all the details, then you are lucky, because the next tutorial gives a overall overview on how light your world in less than a minut
LIGHT YOUR WORLD IN UNITY – 1 Minute tutorial
Not all games are 3D, you may at times need to light up 2D pixel art games, the next tutorial will get you covered.
PIXEL PERFECT LIGHTS AND PARTICLES IN UNITY
We hope these tutorials have helped you learn how to set up lighting in Unity or learn what you already know. Share other useful videos in the comments and don’t forget to join our facebook group page, , follow us on Instagram and Twitter where we share a lot of content too. Check our blog frequently for more interesting contents and tutorials
