Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

This third edition of the Unity Virtual Reality (VR) development guide is updated to cover the latest features of Unity 2019.4 or later versions - the leading platform for building VR games, applications, and immersive experiences for contemporary VR devices. Enhanced with more focus on growing components, such as Universal Render Pipeline (URP), extended reality (XR) plugins, the XR Interaction Toolkit package, and the latest VR devices, this edition will help you to get up to date with the current state of VR. With its practical and project-based approach, this book covers the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You'll learn how to build VR apps that can be experienced with modern devices from Oculus, VIVE, and others. This virtual reality book presents lighting and rendering strategies to help you build cutting-edge graphics, and explains URP and rendering concepts that will enable you to achieve realism for your apps. You'll build real-world VR experiences using world space user interface canvases, locomotion and teleportation, 360-degree media, and timeline animation, as well as learn about important VR development concepts, best practices, and performance optimization and user experience strategies. By the end of this Unity book, you'll be fully equipped to use Unity to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Using Light Probes and Reflection Probes

For non-static GameObjects to receive global illumination, you need to have Light Probes distributed in the Scene. These provide high-quality lighting for moving (dynamic) objects. Light Probes are positions in the scene where information is captured about the light that is passing through the empty space in your Scene. This information is baked similar to lightmaps and then used when the scene is rendered at runtime to approximate the indirect light hitting dynamic objects, based on proximity to the Light Probes nearest to that object. For more information on Light Probes, see https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LightProbes.html and the corresponding subpages.

The difference between light probes and lightmaps is that while lightmaps store lighting information about light hitting the surfaces in your scene, light probes store information about light passing through empty space in your scene. - Unity Manual

A group of Light Probes...