06. Performant Lighting

Performant Lighting

At this point, you should be pretty pretty familiar with the differences between Real Time, Baked, and Mixed Lights in Unity.

As you know, lighting plays a MAJOR role in how performant your application will run. And yet, it is super important to get right in Desktop VR because we have more compute power to work with to increase the visual fidelity of our applications. Here are a few quizzes just to quickly recap lighting basics. Here are a few links just a refresher:

  1. Types of Lights
  2. Pre-computed Lighting
  3. Lighting Mode

Ambient Realtime

Why can ambient light be tricky (check all that apply)?
SOLUTION:
  • It affects the lighting of everything in the scene and is on by default, so changing it can have a large affect on your scene’s lighting

When to Bake

When should you bake lighting (check all that apply)?
SOLUTION:
  • To have the highest resolution lighting possible
  • To save realtime performance on lighting for objects that don’t move

Mixed Lights

When should you use the Mixed Lights option?
SOLUTION:
  • To light moving objects in realtime and bake lights on static object
  • To avoid adding realtime light to objects that have baked lighting using the same light source

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