From the course: Unity 2023 Essential Training

Area and emissive lighting - Unity Tutorial

From the course: Unity 2023 Essential Training

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Area and emissive lighting

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- [Instructor] Now let's explore two other types of light you'll use in your scenes: an area light, and using the emissive setting materials to simulate a light from an object. So let's start with the area light. An area light is a rectangle that produces light with a soft shadowing. So let me create one so you can see it. And actually, let's see if I can change this one. Yes. Okay, so let's change this to an area light. So again, we have a settings of the actual size like before and you can determine the shape, so a tube, a rectangle, or a disc. But let's go back to rectangle. And if you have a rectangle, you can actually see very closely here the size of a rectangle. So if we go ahead and pick those up and you can also change the settings right here, you can change the rectangle. So if you want, let's say for example on the counter like this one, and this is outside so let's go and reposition it. Let's say we wanted to have this inside the house. Okay, so let's position this. And let's say this is where I wanted it, then you could grab the size and make it smaller, like so and fit it right under the counter to emit a specific light, like so. And this is what an area light would be. And again, you have all the other same settings as we had for spotlight or for the point light, so the intensity, the range, the lumen. If you want to change to any other settings, you can choose Nits and EV 100 but most of the time I choose lumen. And then you could increase the intensity and you can see it as I increase the intensity, the counter is a lot more lit here. Perfect. And this is what an area light is. Now the other one that we want to explore is the emissive settings for our material and we're going to use that on our little clock here. So our clock here is a material. So if you click on this, you see that the clock material is right here. So if we click on this, we see all of our settings for the clock material. One of those settings is emissive, and it's right here. So let's say for example, you can also access your clock by clicking on the materials clock here, and you have the emission inputs right here. So we want to have lighting come out of that particular material. So basically you would use emission intensity like so, and you don't need a map. What you could do now is the emission intensity. So we could select Nits, EV, and as you increase it, you're going to see the increased emission. This is going to be done when we do our live baking. Global elimination, you can have it bake or real time. I'm going to have it bake because later on we're going to do our bake map. And this is how you would do emissive. Okay, so now we have explored most of the lights. We'll explore volume next, but I wanted to show you something in this particular model. So let me get to the book and then just get in this area, like so. Now you have a challenge I'd like to show you but before I give you a challenge, I want to show you something that comes with this model because right now, you have lights in this model and you probably saw that by looking at all the gizmos that are here. So if you look into the model, you also have a camera. So if you look, this is the view of the camera on top of the camera that we've actually created here. But if you close everything here, this is the actual model, you have a lighting area here. So if you click on this, this is where you see all the lights that we have in our scene. Not only that, but you have a night scene and you have a day scene. So basically, if you want, you could leverage any of those lights to create your scene when we render and bake our maps later on. So if you want, what you could do is literally just delete all the night elements or delete all the day elements and use this as your lights. And you'll see if you click on this particular light, this is the actual circle that's our directional light for the night. So it's not a sun, but it's some light for the night scene. And everything else are the lights inside the house. So you have this light here, you have a spotlight there, you have another spotlight here, and so on, so forth. And this is the night scene. If you go to the day scene, you have pretty much the exact same thing with some other settings for your scene. So basically you have already all the lights that you need to bake maps, to render a scene. And we're going to have something that will look close enough to what this scene is supposed to look like. But what I recommend is either delete those two and create your own by practicing with the point lights, the spotlights, the area lights, and create your own lighting. I would highly recommend you do this for practice or you can take a look at the example where they put the lights in this model and do similar. It's entirely up to you. So with that said, this is my challenge. Either you do it all by yourself or you use the ones that are inside the model already for learning purposes, and move on to the next video.

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