Introduction

Whether you're willing to make a better-looking game, or add interesting features, lights and effects can boost your project and help you deliver a higher quality product. In this chapter, we will look at the creative ways of using lights and effects, and also take a look at some of Unity's new features, such as Procedural Skyboxes, Reflection Probes, Light Probes, and custom Reflection Sources.

Lighting is certainly an area that has received a lot of attention from Unity, which now features real-time Global Illumination technology provided by Enlighten. This new technology provides better and more realistic results for both real-time and baked lighting. For more information on Unity's Global Illumination system, check out its documentation at http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GIIntro.html.

The big picture

There are many ways of creating light sources in Unity. Here's a quick overview of the most common methods.

Lights

Lights are placed into the scene as game objects...