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 scene, including a simple game environment and an instance of Unity's Rollerball sample asset, which will be used as the player character. The geometry for the scene was created using ProBuilder 2.0, an extension developed by ProCore, and...