Lighting
While the 3D geometry defines the shape of your content, lighting is the basis of every virtual scene defining colors and final look of your objects. UNIGINE features the following types of the light sources:
- Dynamic lighting is a customizable solution providing real-time lighting calculation. This advanced technique provides very realistic lighting as it can illuminate dynamic objects. Light sources themselves can be moved or changed in real time (for example, turned on and off). As the most objects in the scene are rendered in the deferred pass, dynamic light sources won't cause big performance losses. All UNIGINE light source are dynamic except for the environment probe, which can be either dynamic or static.
- Static (precomputed) lighting is an efficient and utile solution for lighting of relatively static scenes. It allows dropping the most of lighting computations, leaving only simple texture lookups to be performed at the rendering time. Still, this method still only roughly simulate the lighting for the moving objects entering the scene and sometimes lack physical accuracy registered by the eye.
Light Source | Image | Dynamic Mode | Static Mode |
---|---|---|---|
LightOmni (omnidirectional point light) | Emits light from a point source in all directions. | - | |
LightProj (projected light) | Emits light from a single point forming a focused beam aimed in a specific direction. | - | |
LightWorld (sun light) | Casts parallel beams onto the scene from an infinitely remote point. | - | |
LightEnvironmentProbe (environment probe) | Grabs a cubemap each frame thus providing objects in the scene with dynamic reflections from a point source in all directions. | Uses a prebaked cubemap to provide objects in the scene with reflections from a point source in all directions. | |
LightVoxelProbe (voxel probe) | - | Provides volume to bake lighting. Uses a prebaked voxel map to provide objects in the scene with indirect lighting from any light source. |
See Also
- The Light Sources Parameters article.
- The Bake Lighting Tool article.
- Video Tutorial: Lighting.
Last update: 2018-04-26
Help improve this article
Was this article helpful?
(or select a word/phrase and press Ctrl+Enter)