Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development - Second Edition

By : Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo
Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development - Second Edition

By: Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Overview of this book

Learning how to use Unity is the quickest way to creating a full game, but that’s not all you can do with this simple, yet comprehensive suite of video game development tools – Unity is just as useful for creating AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and practical games for training and education. Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development outlines a practical journey to creating your first full game from the ground up, building it step-by-step and applying your knowledge as you progress. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will teach you how to develop the game using several Unity tools. As you advance, you will learn how to use the Unity engine, create simple scripts using C#, integrate graphics, sound, and animations, and manipulate physics to create interesting mechanics for your game. You’ll be able to apply all the knowledge that you gain to a real-world game. Later chapters will show you how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs efficiently. Finally, you'll work with Unity's AR tools to create AR experiences for 3D apps and games. By the end of this Unity book, you will have created a complete game and built a solid foundation in using a wide variety of Unity tools.
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Our First Level
7
Section 2 – Improving Graphics and Sound
16
Section 3 – Scripting Level Interactivity with C#
24
Section 4 – Releasing Your Game

Optimizing lighting

We mentioned previously that not calculating lighting is good for performance, but what about not calculating lights, but still having them? Yes, it sounds too good to be true, but it is actually possible (and, of course, tricky). We can use a technique called static lighting or baking, which allows us to calculate lighting once and use the cached result.

In this section, we will cover the following concepts related to Static Lighting:

  • Understanding static lighting
  • Baking lightmaps
  • Applying static lighting to dynamic objects

Understanding static lighting

The idea is pretty simple: just do the lighting calculations once, save the results, and then use those instead of calculating lighting all the time. You may be wondering why this isn't the default technique to use. This is because it has some limitations, with the big one being dynamic objects. Precalculating shadows means that they can't change once they've been calculated...