Using an emissive material to light the scene

One of the first examples that we'll explore is a material – a lamp, to be precise – that is being used outside of its traditional comfort zone. This light-emitting object isn't going to rely on a light asset derived from one of the many different engine classes that are available to us—instead, we'll use a good, old material to do the job. We won't stop there though, as creating the material is actually not the difficult part. What's going to be tricky is getting the right results out of the light baking process, so we'll explore which settings we need to tweak there. All in all, we'll have access to a powerful way of faking and computing light which will come in handy in many different situations.

Let's start exploring one of them! Take a look at the following screenshot:

Getting ready

Even though we are going to be using some custom 3D models and textures in this recipe, this is just so we have something pretty to look at. If you want to use...