LogInThis week, we're going to show you 10 useful tutorials on how to set up lighting in your 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.
If you've just started modeling or creating games, you should check out this tutorial from Daniel Stringer, where he explains different types of lights: Directional, Point, Spot, and Area Light. He also covers emissive materials.
Now that you know what you're working with, it's useful to learn lighting settings. In this video, game industry professionals from Game Dev Republic explain how real-time, baked, and mixed lighting works and share other useful information.
After that, it's time to talk about lightmapping – the process of pre-calculating the brightness of surfaces and storing the result into a texture. No better source to learn about it than the official Unity channel.
Here is one more useful video on lightmapping – this time, from UGuruz. He starts by explaining why we need to bake lights and proceeds to show how to do it, how to generate lightmap UVs and optimize lighting for mobile games.
Not the freshest tutorial here but very comprehensible and easy to follow. Brackeys has left YouTube, but his videos still help Unity users thanks to their simplicity. Here, he shows how to use Unity's Progressive Lightmapper and explains Global Illumination and baking along the way.
Another video from Brackeys shows how to use Light Probes to store lighting information and make sure your moving objects are appropriately lit.
Unity uses Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). To put it simply, it's a performance vs. quality battle, with URP being more, well, universal, and HDRP aimed at higher-end hardware and photorealism.
In this tutorial, UGuruz talks about lighting interiors in URP and setting up post-processing.
In contrast, in this tutorial, the same artist shows how to work with exterior lighting, this time in HDPR. He demonstrates how to add a Reflection Probe, post-effects, and fog.
Here, LMHPOLY shows how to deal with lighting and post-processing in a low poly scene. The tutorial is pretty simple and has captions to make it even easier to follow the instructions.
Another change of pace: let's move from a low poly scene to a realistic one. Sam Dogantimur, CEO and host of Sykoo, demonstrates how important the right lighting is, especially for a realistic environment.
We hope these tutorials helped you either learn how to set up lighting in Unity or master what you had already known. Share other useful videos in the comments and don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.