Book Image

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Book Image

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Overview of this book

Unity 5 is a flexible and intuitive multiplatform game engine that is becoming the industry's de facto standard. Learn to craft your own 2D and 3D computer games by working through core concepts such as animation, audio, shaders, GUI, lights, cameras, and scripting to create your own games with one of the most important and popular engines in the industry. Completely re-written to cover the new features of Unity 5, this book is a great resource for all Unity game developers, from those who have recently started using Unity right up to game development experts. The first half of the book focuses on core concepts of 2D game design while the second half focuses on developing 3D game development skills. In the first half, you will discover the new GUI system, the new Audio Mixer, external files, and animating 2D characters in 2D game development. As you progress further, you will familiarize yourself with the new Standard Shaders, the Mecanim system, Cameras, and the new Lighting features to hone your skills towards building 3D games to perfection. Finally, you will learn non-player character control and explore Unity 5's extra features to enhance your 3D game development skills.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Unity 5.x Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Lighting a simple scene with Lightmaps and Light Probes


Lightmaps are a great alternative to real-time lighting, as they can provide the desired look to an environment without being processor-intensive. There is one downside, though—since there is no way of baking Lightmaps onto the dynamic objects, the lighting of the important elements of the game (such as player characters themselves) can look artificial, failing to match the intensity of the surrounding area. The solution? Light Probes.

Light Probes work by sampling the light intensity over the location that they are placed at. Dynamic objects, once Light Probe-enabled, will be lit according to the interpolation of the nearest probes around them.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we have prepared a basic scene, including a simple game environment and an instance of Unity's Rollerball sample asset, which will be used as the player character. The geometry for the scene was created using ProBuilder 2.0, an extension developed by ProCore, and...