UNITY AMBIENT LIGHT FULL

By adding a direction, we will increase the realism of the scene and add a nice 3D look to it.Īs mentioned in tutorial 1, the ambient light got the following equation:ĭiffuse light builds on this equation, adding a direction to the equation: As we saw, using only ambient light can make a 3D scene look 2D. Anyways, Diffuse Light?ĭiffuse light isn’t very different from ambient light implementation wise, but it got one very important property, a direction to the light. However, this isn’t the right way to do it in Unity, so we will re-implement it using ShaderLabs built-in variables to use the actual properties of the lights in our scene. This means that we need to set the light direction as a parameter to it, the light colors and so on.

UNITY AMBIENT LIGHT FULL

One is where we implement the full shader. We will make the lighting equation a bit more interesting this time by adding a direction to it.

Today we are going to work continue where we left on Tutorial 1. Note that changing the color of the ambient source does not affect the visible Skybox, instead it only affects the color of lighting within the scene.Hi, and welcome to Tutorial 2 of the Unity 5 Shader Programming series. The other options for the ‘Ambient Source’ include a solid color, or a ‘Gradient’ which is a simple color ramp applied over the hemisphere. The Skybox in this case is the default procedural Skybox that - with default settings - contributes a blue tint to the Ambient Lighting of the scene. The default value is for the ‘Ambient Source’ property to be set to ‘Skybox’. Notice how light is now occluded in areas of contact between surfaces.Ī significant advantage of using ambient light is that it is cheap to render and so particularly useful for mobile applications where perhaps it is desirable to minimize the number of lights in your scene.Īmbient Lighting can be controlled in the Lighting window from the ‘Environment Lighting’ section (Lighting>Scene>Ambient Source). Now using Precomputed Realtime GI by marking the objects as static. Notice how the visible Skybox does not change when changes are made to the Ambient Intensity. The same scene with no light whatsoever (Left) and with only Ambient Light (Right). 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 - giving a more realistic result. Without using one of Unity’s precomputed lighting solutions, ambient light will not be occluded and therefore will not be physically accurate. Ambient light can also be useful if you need to increase the overall brightness of a scene without adjusting individual lights. An example would be bright, cartoon-style rendering where dark shadows may be undesirable or where lighting is perhaps hand-painted into textures.

This can be thought of as a global light source affecting objects in the scene from every direction.Īmbient light can be useful in a number of cases, depending upon your chosen art style. Ambient Lighting Checked with version: 5.1 - Difficulty: BeginnerĪn important contributor to the overall look and brightness of a scene is ‘ambient lighting’.

Unity ambient light