The lights in any project that has to do with the audiovisual world is very important. That is why I learn to do light bake in Unity It’s very important. This is essential that we know how to do it because within the Unity graphics engine it does not allow us to put more than 8 lights actively, so what we have to do is create them in the form of a texture so that they do not consume performance and thus the project does not fail us. But before we teach you how to bake lights in Unity, let’s see why lighting is so important.
Why is lighting so important in our projects?
Lighting is very important and we see it everywhere we go. These allow us to distinguish silhouettes and shapes, in addition to affecting our mood. We found lights that natural light or artificial light that generate many lighting variables. Thanks to lighting we can achieve a lot of depth in our projects as well as giving a more realistic touch to each scene we are creating. No matter where we look, we always have light around us, that is why simulating it is very important so that our projects are much more visual for the users who are seeing our work. That is why knowing all the types of lights that the Unity graphics engine allows us is really important since we can, thanks to the lights that it offers us, simulate certain lights that we have in our day to day natural light or artificial light. We can distinguish different types of lights depending on the project that we have left. Next, I will show you two examples of white and hard lights that we can find.
What are hard lights or soft lights
Within the lights, we find differences, among them are the hard lights and the soft lights. The use of this type of lights depends a lot on what and how we want to illuminate.
Hard lights what they are and when we have to use them
Hard lights are all those that cause some strong and marked shadows. These are used especially when we are simulating the lights of a small room, for sunlight, certain spatial scenes, when we want to achieve an effect of insecurity in the scene towards the people who are seeing the work we have done.
Soft lights what they are and when we have to use them
Soft lights are those that are not hard and that they have a small gradient allowing you to see through it.
These lights are used to illuminate cloudy days, to create indirect lighting, shadows created by translucent materials, interior lighting, to highlight the beauty of a character and to generate more realistic renders.
How to add lights inside the Unity graphics engine
Now that you know a little regarding lighting, what we are going to do is show you step by step how you can add lights within our project in the Unity graphics engine.
For this we will go to the left side where we find the list of things that we have in our scene see project that we are creating, in a free space we will right click and this will open a drop-down menu. Within this drop-down menu we will have to choose the option lights. Within this option we can see different lights that we can choose to add to our project. Each of these lights allow us to create different effects, so it is good to know each one of them in order to create the effect that we have left in this project. Now you just have to add the lights you want in the project to later to bake them remember that it does not allow us to create lights that are in constant movement through light and shadow since it can give an error in this project, so it is advisable to do this process in the images that we know will not have movement.
Bake the lights that we have put in the sky
Once we have placed all the lights that interest us within the scene of our project in the Unity graphics engine. It’s time to bake the lights.
First of all we have to select the objects we want and at the top right select the option Static. Once there is a market in Castilla we will go to the window tab that we find at the top of the interface and select Rendering, then select Lighting. This will cause a new tab to open on the top right next to the inspector. Once we have placed this tab, we will go down and here we will find an option called Generate Lighting. We will see how a loading bar is made in which it indicates that the bake process is being done in the lights that we have placed within the scene of our project. This process may take a while so don’t worry if it takes a while since it depends a lot on the computer we have. So I recommend that you be patient and wait for a burrito for the process to finish. Once the process is finished, if we move the candies that we have left, we will see that the light does not change since it has been created as if it were a texture within our objects.
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If you have come this far, you already have the perfect lights for your project to be able to continue creating the scene in your project. You can do this process as many times as necessary.
