Lighting Your Worlds and Experiences

Lighting plays a critical role in VR development and has the power to make or break the overall experience of an application. The right lighting system can help to create an immersive and believable environment that is engaging and enjoyable for users.

In this chapter of our book, we will be diving into the intricacies of the lighting system in Unity. As you progress through the chapter, you will learn about all the essential components of the lighting system, including directional lights, spot lights, point lights, and area lights. These components play a crucial role in creating dynamic and realistic lighting in your VR environment.

Additionally, we will also be discussing the use of skybox materials and emissive materials, which are essential in creating a believable and immersive environment. Another important aspect of lighting in Unity is light baking, which is the process of pre-computing lighting information to improve performance...

Technical requirements

The complete source code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Enhancing-Virtual-Reality-Experiences-with-Unity-2022/tree/main/EnhancingVRExperiencesFullProject/Assets/_VRProjectAssets/Scenes/Chapter_6.

Getting to know the Unity lighting system

Unity’s lighting system is a powerful tool for creating realistic and immersive environments in games and other interactive experiences. The lighting system is based on physically based rendering (PBR), allowing Unity to simulate the physical properties of light and how it interacts with objects in the real world. It allows developers to control the way light interacts with objects in their scenes and create complex lighting effects such as shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion to provide more realistic and believable lighting effects in their VR experiences. Let’s have a look at this in a bit more detail, as follows:

• Shadows: The effect in Unity’s lighting system that simulates the way light is blocked by objects in a scene, creating areas of darkness. This can greatly enhance the realism of lighting in a VR environment.
• Reflections: The ability of Unity’s lighting system to simulate the way light...

Simulating indoor lighting

In this section, we will be focusing on simulating indoor lighting using the lighting system. We will start by removing the main plane and keeping the simple skybox. Next, we will add the demo room and VR rig back into the scene. We will then replace the emissive materials with regular standard materials and set up the lighting for the indoor demo room. Finally, we will create a high-quality skybox material to enhance the overall look and feel of the indoor lighting.

Before we begin, create a new scene called 06_03_IndoorLighting.

To set up our indoor lighting scene, go through the following steps:

1. Go to our Prefabs folder in the Project tab.
2. Add a DemoRoom prefab.
3. Add a VR Rig prefab.
4. Remove the Main Camera.
5. Add an Event System GO.
6. In the Event System GO, select Replace with InputSystemUIInputModule.
7. Create a DarkGrey_Standard material for the walls.
8. Create a LightGrey_Standard material for the ground.
9. Apply...

Modifying quality settings for lighting

Before we move to emissive materials, you may have noticed that there is a limit to how many active lights there are.

To change the quality settings to improve the light count, go through the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Project Settings tab.
2. Select Quality Settings.
3. Change Quality to Medium.
4. Set Pixel Light Count to 10 (Figure 6.13). Be aware that increasing the pixel light count can negatively impact the performance of low-end devices, so monitor their performance and adjust the pixel light count as necessary to achieve a balance between visual quality and performance.

Figure 6.13 – Quality settings for optimizing the amount of available lights rendered in our demo scene

Figure 6.14 – Optimizing rendered lights in our demo scene: before (top) and after (bottom)

We can now give our lightbulbs a glow with emissive materials.

Emissive materials...

Introducing post-processing

Post-processing in Unity refers to a set of techniques and effects that can be applied to a scene after the main rendering has been completed. This can include effects such as color correction, bloom, depth of field, and many others. Key features of post-processing in Unity include the following:

• A wide range of effects: Unity provides a large number of post-processing effects that can be applied to a scene, ranging from simple color correction to more complex effects such as bloom, depth of field, and motion blur
• Customizability: Each post-processing effect in Unity can be customized and adjusted to suit the specific needs of a project, allowing developers to fine-tune the look of their VR environments
• Easy to use: Post-processing effects in Unity can be easily applied to a scene using the Unity post-processing stack, which is a set of tools and scripts that simplify the process of adding post-processing effects to a scene

Post-processing...

Summary

This chapter has provided an in-depth exploration of the lighting system in Unity and its various components. From directional lights, spot lights, point lights, and area lights, to skybox materials, emissive materials, light baking, post-processing effects, and local and global volumes, this chapter covers all the essential elements of lighting in Unity. Now that you are at the end of this chapter, you will have a solid understanding of how to use lighting and post-processing to create dynamic and realistic VR environments. Whether you are just starting out or are an experienced Unity developer, this chapter will give you the knowledge and skills you need to take your VR development to the next level. In the next chapter, we will explore audio and sound effects.