In Unity 5

Lights in Unity run the Gambit from insanely large and intense to soft and subtle in color and tone.  Lighting breathes life into a game and can make or break it on those grounds alone.  Good evening gents and ladies.  Today’s tutorial is on lighting.  I’ll be covering the basic types of lights you can add into a scene and how to implement them.

First, it should be said that lighting is a component.  You start off with an empty game object and add a lighting component to it.  See the screen below for what an example light might look like in an inspector.

Lights can be any color and you can set the intensity to 8 if you want to blare out the color with strong bulbs.  Most of the time, every other setting can be left along.  There are 3 main types of lights for most purposes (directional, spot & point) and I’ll go over each one briefly.

Directional Light

As seen in the image above and below, this is a directional light.  A directional light acts like a sun and illuminates the ground and every object from one direction.  Your light doesn’t need to be high up though.  In fact, a directional light can be under the ground and it will still light each object in a scene regardless of position.

Spot Light

A spot light radiates in a cone, traditionally.  Think of this like a flashlight or any light a person might carry.  Like all lights, you can attach a cookie texture that will influence the shape of the projection, which is especially handy for a flashlight.  If you happened to install the Standard Assets package, then you should already have some flashlight cookies to go with a spot light.

Point Light

Last, but not least is a point light.  If spot lights are the lights that humans carry, then point lights are the radiation sources of objects.  Lamps and glowing fixtures almost always have point lights.  Essentially, a point light is a light source that radiates in all directions, though otherwise behaves like a spot light.

And that’s all I have for today.  Stay tuned for more tutorials!