"More Than Meets The Eye" Animated VR Experience

 Verbatim extracts from  https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b532 Light Probes Only static objects are considered by Unity’s Baked or Precomputed Realtime GI systems. In order for dynamic objects such as interactive scene elements or characters to pick up some of the rich bounced light that our static geometry receives, we need to record this lighting information into a format which can be quickly read and used in our lighting equations during gameplay. We do this by placing sample points in the world and then capturing light from all directions. The color information these points record is then encoded into a set of values (or ‘coefficients’) which can be quickly evaluated during gameplay. In Unity, we call these sample points, ‘Light Probes’. Scene using Light Probes. Notice how they have been placed in greater density around areas of lighting change - such as shadows or color transition. Light Probes allow moving...

 Emissive materials in Unity. Verbatim extracts from  https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b532 Emissive Materials Whilst Area Lights are not supported by Precomputed Realtime GI, similar soft lighting effects are still possible using ‘Emissive Materials.’ Like Area Lights, emissive materials emit light across their surface area. They contribute to bounced light in your scene and associated properties such as color and intensity can be changed during gameplay. ‘Emission’ is a property of the Standard Shader which allows static objects in our scene to emit light. By default the value of ‘Emission’ is set to zero. This means no light will be emitted by objects assigned materials using the Standard Shader. The HDR color picker can be used to select colors with intensities beyond the 0-1 range in order to create bright light effects similar to those of Area Lights. There is no range value for emissive materials but light...

   Verbatim extracts from  https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b530 Light Types We have now covered some of the project settings which need to be considered before beginning work on lighting your scenes in Unity. Hopefully at this point you should have your project configured appropriately for your target platform (generally Baked GI and Gamma Color Space for mobile, Precomputed Realtime GI and Linear Color Space for Standalone PC or recent games consoles). Let’s move on to looking at the tools available for achieving the lighting you want in your game. Directional Lights ‘Directional Lights’ are very useful for creating effects such as sunlight in your scenes. Behaving in many ways like the sun, Directional Lights can be thought of as distant light sources which exist infinitely far away. Light rays emitted from Directional Lights are parallel to one another and do not diverge like those from other light typ...

 Verbatim extracts from  https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b530 Ambient Lighting An important contributor to the overall look and brightness of a scene is ‘ambient lighting’. This can be thought of as a global light source affecting objects in the scene from every direction. Ambient light can be useful in a number of cases, depending upon your chosen art style. An example would be bright, cartoon-style rendering where dark shadows may be undesirable or where lighting is perhaps hand-painted into textures. Ambient light can also be useful if you need to increase the overall brightness of a scene without adjusting individual lights. Without using one of Unity’s precomputed lighting solutions, ambient light will not be occluded and therefore will not be physically accurate. However if either Baked GI or Precomputed Realtime GI are enabled in your scene then this ‘skylight’ will be blocked by objects in your scene - g...

 Verbatim extracts from  https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b52f Reflections Reflection Source By default, objects in a scene are rendered using Unity’s ‘Standard Shader’. The Standard Shader is a 'physically based shader' (PBS). This attempts to accurately represent the behavior of light on materials by mimicking physical properties such as reflectivity and the principles of ‘energy conservation’ which exist in the real world. When using the Standard Shader, every material has a degree of reflectivity based on its ‘specularity’, or ‘metalness’. Without hardware powerful enough to ray trace reflections in realtime we have to rely on pre-rendering reflections. We do this with a cubemap - a 6-sided image of the world derived either from the sky, or from a ‘Reflection Probe’ which renders the environment from a specific point in space, writing the results to a texture. This is then blended with other lighting and surf...

  High Dynamic Range (HDR) As well as Color Space, the ‘dynamic range’ of your camera needs to be configured. Essentially, this defines how extremely bright or dark colors are captured by scene cameras. HDR can be enabled from the camera component in the Inspector by using the HDR checkbox. Note that HDR is unsupported by some mobile hardware. It is also not supported in Forward Rendering when using techniques such as multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA). HDR is best used in combination with Linear Color Space in order to preserve accuracy when handling very bright colors . By default, cameras in Unity use a Low Dynamic Range (LDR). Colors are stored using 8-bits per channel - red, green and blue. 8-bits refers to the ‘precision’ and means that color data is stored with 8 values of either 1 or 0, giving 256 possible unique combinations for each color channel. 256 x 256 x 256 colors per channel means that by storing values using 8-bits we are able to uniquely reference over 16 mi...

 Verbatim extracts from  https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b52c Choosing a Rendering Path Unity supports a number of rendering techniques, or ‘paths’. An important early decision which needs to be made when starting a project is which path to use. Unity’s default is 'Forward Rendering”. Forward Rendering In Forward Rendering, each object is rendered in a ‘pass’ for each light that affects it. Therefore each object might be rendered multiple times depending upon how many lights are within range. The advantages of this approach is that it can be very fast - meaning hardware requirements are lower than alternatives. Additionally, Forward Rendering offers us a wide range of custom ‘shading models’ and can handle transparency quickly. It also allows for the use of hardware techniques like ‘multi-sample anti-aliasing’ (MSAA) which are not available in other alternatives, such as Deferred Rendering which can have a great...

Lighting in Unity tutorials Verbatim extracts from  https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lighting-and-rendering#5c7f8528edbc2a002053b528 Global illumination , or ‘GI’, is a term used to describe a range of techniques and mathematical models which attempt to simulate the complex behaviour of light as it bounces and interacts with the world. Simulating global illumination accurately is challenging and can be computationally expensive. Because of this, games use a range of approaches to handle these calculations beforehand, rather than during gameplay Realtime Lighting By default, lights in Unity - directional, spot and point, are realtime. This means that they contribute direct light to the scene and update every frame. As lights and GameObjects are moved within the scene, lighting will be updated immediately. This can be observed in both the scene and game views. Baked GI Lighting When 'baking’ a ‘lightmap', the effects of light on static objects in the scene are...