Different Types of Lights in Unity

Welcome back! Today we’re going to talk about 4 types of light sources within Unity. It’s good to have different sources and types of light to use as some might help with mood while others help give player knowledge about their surroundings. If you go to the top of your window at GameObject > Light you’ll be able to see Directional Light, Point Light, Spotlight, and Area Light.

Let’s start with directional light. This is an infinite light source that travels in one direction at a time. You can rotate the direction of this light all the way from one side of your “sky” to the other. High noon, evening, and dusk can be yours to command! Even if you are in a building this will affect the light in your environment, so keep that in mind!

Next is a Point Light! These are very simple and easy to understand lights, BUT have so much use and applications. Think of them as lights that extend in a sphere like radius from a “point”. You could also imagine them as light bulbs in a scene. You can adjust the radius or move the point light to affect one area over another.

Then we have the Spotlight. It is similar in function to a point light but does not go a full 360 degrees around itself. It covers a small region that you can increase up to 180 degrees (or a semi-sphere). These are great for things like flashlights which are a source of light that point in one direction. If you’ve ever seen a traditional “jail break” in a cartoon, they’ve always got that one tower that that shoots a beam of light from a point down onto the ground that forms a circle and tries to find the escapee.

The last one we’ll look at is Area Lights and can be a difficult one to use. These work best with stationary things as they’re not meant to move. You can set it to a region and expand where you want illuminated. Then for it to even have an effect, the objects in range must be set to Static or they will not work with the area light. These have very particular uses and work best with baked lighting as it does not work with real time lighting.

One tip I’d like to show you is the Gizmo tab above your scene view. If you are having trouble visualizing the light you can make sure you have gizmos activated and it will really change how you view things. Let’s check that Spotlight again, but this time with Gizmos activated.

While that can get messy when a whole lot of objects are populated right next to each other all at once, its also a VERY useful tool when you want to get down to the nitty gritty. I’m going to add some point lights around the room as interesting spots, and some spotlights aiming at the tubes. What will you do with today’s knowledge in your own project? Next time we’ll talk about altering texture maps to change parts of our scene. See you again soon!

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