Book Image

Unity 3D Game Development

By : Anthony Davis, Travis Baptiste, Russell Craig, Ryan Stunkel
Book Image

Unity 3D Game Development

By: Anthony Davis, Travis Baptiste, Russell Craig, Ryan Stunkel

Overview of this book

This book, written by a team of experts at Unity Technologies, follows an informal, demystifying approach to the world of game development. Within Unity 3D Game Development, you will learn to: Design and build 3D characters and game environments Think about the users’ interactions with your game Develop an interface and apply visual effects to add an emotional connection to your world Gain a solid foundation of sound design, animations, and lighting Build, test, and add final touches The book contains expert insights that you’ll read before you look into the project on GitHub to understand all the underpinnings. This way, you get to see the end result, and you’re allowed to be creative and give your own thoughts to design, as well as work through the process with the new tools we introduce. Join the book community on Discord to read this book with Unity game developers, and the team of authors. Ask questions, build teams, chat with the authors, participate in events and much more. The link to join is included in the book.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
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15
Index

Lighting

We’ve decided to put lighting in the finishing touches, but this could have had its own book. This is one of those topics that are a massive rabbit hole. We wanted to go over some basics of lighting here and the reason why it’s important to pay attention to lighting, as well as highlighting a few polishing tools and how to use lighting in Unity.

First, we need to explain that lighting is an art. The purpose of lighting includes defining 3D form, providing mood, and designing methods for gameplay. After we go through a few design thoughts on lighting, we will take a tour of the Unity mixed lighting, lightmaps, reflection, and light probes.

3D form

Without lighting, a 3D form is flat. In fact, we use unlit shaders for most effects. One reason is that we don’t need to add shadowing and lighting for small shiny effects that will only be on screen for a short time. They are flat and don’t need lighting to help define them; their texture...