3D! What with the Lighting and Such.

Objective: Understand emission channel and light mapping!

Lighting is everything when it comes to level design, and the first thing you’ll notice on any medium if it is wrong or not done well. In Unity there are a few features you can use to set lighting well in your game or app.

Emission Channel. Emission Channel, also known as self illuminous, is basically light from an object that isn’t using a light source, but it is grabbing light data from a texture or a color.

Light Mapping. There are two forms of light mapping. Progressive and Enlightened.

Progressive allows you to bake in real time and see the results quickly.

Enlightened mode means the scene needs to bake before you can see any changes.

You can choose your light mapping mode under the lightmapping settings. To get to the setting you need to navigate from the windows tab > rendering > lighting.

Auto Generate detects those changes and it automatically bakes your map. If you turn this off, you are then responsible for generating your new light data.

Becoming failure with these features is essential for building beautiful lighting for your game. Don’t be afraid to experiment with these features, remember, with the power of CTRL + Z you can undo anything that goes wrong. I’ll see you in the next tutorial!