Add ambient light from the environment

Ambient light, also known as diffuse environmental light, is light that is present all around the SceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary and doesn’t come from any specific source object. It can be an important contributor to the overall look and brightness of a scene.

Ambient light can be useful in a number of cases, depending upon your chosen art style. An example would be bright, cartoon-style rendering where dark shadows may be undesirable or where lighting is perhaps hand-painted into textures. Ambient lightLight that doesn’t come from any specific direction, and contributes equal light in all directions to the Scene. More info
See in Glossary can also be useful if you need to increase the overall brightness of a scene without adjusting individual lights.

Add ambient light

After you create a skybox material, Unity can use it to generate ambient lighting in your Scene. To make Unity do this:

1. Open the Lighting window (menu: Window > Rendering > Lighting Settings).
2. Assign your chosen skyboxA special type of Material used to represent skies. Usually six-sided. More info
   See in Glossary to the Skybox Material property.
3. Click the Source drop-down and, from the list, click Skybox.

You can also specify when Unity updates the ambient lighting. To do this, change the Ambient Mode. The two values are:

• Realtime: Unity constantly regenerates ambient lighting for your Scene. This is useful if you alter the skybox at run-time
• Baked: Unity only generates ambient lighting for your Scene when you click the Generate Lighting button at the bottom of the Lighting window. This is useful if your skybox does not change during run-time because it saves computational resources.

Additional resources

• Skyboxes
• Visual environment in the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)
• Changing lighting at runtime
• Add ambient occlusion
• Screen space ambient occlusion in URP