To control the behaviour of all the lights in a 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 that have a Light ModeA Light property that defines the use of the Light. Can be set to Realtime, Baked and Mixed. More info
See in Glossary of Mixed, set the Lighting Mode in the Lighting Settings Asset.
There are four options for Lighting Mode, in order of visual fidelity:
For information about which render pipelineA series of operations that take the contents of a Scene, and displays them on a screen. Unity lets you choose from pre-built render pipelines, or write your own. More info
See in Glossary supports which Lighting Mode, refer to Render pipeline feature comparison reference.
The following table shows how Unity calculates lighting from Mixed lights for each Lighting Mode.
Lighting from Mixed lights | Baked Indirect Lighting Mode | Shadowmask Lighting Mode | Distance Shadowmask Lighting Mode | Subtractive Lighting Mode |
---|---|---|---|---|
Direct lighting | Real-time | Real-time | Real-time | Real-time for dynamic GameObjectsThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info See in Glossary, baked for static GameObjects. |
Indirect lighting | Baked | Baked | Baked | Baked |
Specular highlights | Yes | Yes | Yes | Dynamic GameObjects only |
Shadows from dynamic GameObjects, up to Shadow Distance | Real-time | Real-time | Real-time | Real-time, from the single highest-intensity Directional Light only |
Shadows from static GameObjects, up to Shadow Distance | Real-time | Baked, from a maximum of 4 lights per GameObject | Real-time | Baked, from a maximum of 4 lights per GameObject |
Shadows from static GameObjects, beyond Shadow Distance | No shadows | Baked, from a maximum of 4 lights per GameObject | Baked, from a maximum of 4 lights per GameObject | No shadows |
Unity stores baked indirect lighting in the following places:
Unity stores shadows in the following places:
In Subtractive mode, real-time and baked shadows might not blend correctly, because lightmaps don’t contain enough data to calculate blending accurately. To improve blending, adjust the Realtime Shadow Color setting in the Lighting window.
If you select Shadowmask mode or Distance Shadowmask mode, Unity creates shadow mask textures to store baked shadows for static GameObjects. Each shadow mask texture stores occlusion information about baked lightsLight components whose Mode property is set to Baked. Unity pre-calculates the illumination from Baked Lights before runtime, and does not include them in any runtime lighting calculations. More info
See in Glossary, and has the following characteristics:
If more than four lights overlap a texel, Unity bakes the remaining lights for that texel. If you bake again, the same lights stay baked unless you change the overlapping lights.
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