Understanding and Implementing Lighting in Unity

Lighting, in any game project, is extremely important. The significance stems from the fact that it influences a Unity project’s performance, in addition to adding visual appeal. Therefore, as designers or visual artists, we should be aware of where to employ which light. We’ll talk about a handful of Unity’s lights and the options in this lesson.

Note: Although we have different render pipelines, on a fundamental level, all lights operate in the same manner.

Lighting

In Unity, we can add lighting by using light components present in “GameObject > Light.” Currently, there are four types of built-in light components present in Unity, which are as follows:

Now, we’ll discuss each light in detail and learn the use cases where we can add those to make any Unity scene performant and visually pleasing.

Point Light

As the name implies, a Point Light source emits light evenly, spreading out in all directions. As shown in the figure below, a Point Light source releases light beams that ...