Different Lights in Unity
Level Design
The Unity Editor comprises four(4) different types of lighting which affect the scene differently. In today’s article, we’ll be taking a look at each of these lights using complementary images from the official Unity Manual, and my sci-fi room level to see them in action.
Directional Lights
You probably already noticed, but when you start a new Unity Project, you always have a Directional Light in your Hierarchy. This is set as the default lighting because it is essentially your sunlight — this will light up everything in your scene and follow a directional orientation that casts shadows in perspective to its angle.
You can think of it as a knob or dial where the opposite extremes represent dawn and nightfall.
That makes Directional Lights exceptionally helpful when creating day-night cycles, especially with the aid of a Procedural Skybox.
Point Lights
The Point Lights send an equal amount of light within a set range. This type of lighting may seem simple, but it’s actually a lot smarter and more useful than you might think — I don’t want to overcomplicate things, but these intricate little lights actually follow a law of physics known as the Inverse Square Law, this makes them behave much like a light would in real life.
To put it in the simplest term I can think of, this means that the more distance between the light’s origin the less intense it becomes. For Level Design, these lights are great to create lamps and other similar light sources.
If you look at the floor in this image, you can see the intensity change and how it becomes wider and less focused.
Spot Lights
A Spot Light is a cone-shaped illumination source. The cone shape comes from its angular constrictions — the bigger the angle, the wider the cone. Similar to a Point Light, it has a specific range and location where the intensity diminishes.
Additionally, the light also diminishes at the edges of the cone, this is known as “penumbra” or partial lighting. This effect can be made more apparent depending on how wide the angle/cone is.
These lights are exceptionally useful for creating car headlights or flashlights. This is a bit of a throwback image where I used Spotlights to generate the car headlights.
Area Lights
An Area Light is a rectangle or disc which spreads light uniformly from one side of the shape in all directions across its surface. This type of lighting tends to be softer and more subtle than the examples we saw before, and unlike the previous lights, in order to use it, the objects this light will illuminate must be set to static.
The range property defines the size of the shape.
Since Areal Lights simultaneously illuminate from different directions, the shading tends to be soft and subtle. Although the difference is mild, here is an image with the range set to 10, and one set to 50.
Among the usage for Area Lights, includes street lights or banks of light. And yes, Area Lights also follow the Inverse Square Law.
These lights can also be rather aesthetic due to their softness and can be combined in creative ways. Here is a sphere being illuminated by Area Lights:
There is a lot you can do with the different lights in Unity, just start experimenting and see how things work out!
In the next article, I will be going over How to Alter Premade Texture Maps in Unity!
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