Lighting a simple scene with Lightmaps and Light Probes

Lightmaps are a great alternative to real-time lighting, as they can provide the desired look to an environment without being processor-intensive. There is one downside, though – since there is no way of baking Lightmaps onto the dynamic objects, the lighting of the important elements of the game (such as player characters themselves) can look artificial, failing to match the intensity of the surrounding area. The solution? Light Probes.

 

Light Probes work by sampling the light intensity over the location that they are placed at. Dynamic objects, once Light Probe-enabled, will be lit according to the interpolation of the nearest probes around them:

Getting ready

For this recipe, we have prepared a basic Unity package (rollerballLevel.unitypackage), including a game environment containing emissive lamps (from the previous recipe!), and Game Objects, making a suitable level for a RollerBall game. The Game Objects are static, and the Directional...