The Amazing Power of Light Probes
Objective: Learn what are and how to use Light Probes in Unity.
As usual, lets start with the simple question, what are Light Probes ? Light Probes store information about light hitting surfaces in your scene and provide a way to capture and use that information. There are two uses of light probes within Unity. The first is to add high-quality light including indirect light bounce and the other is moving objects.
Now that we know what they are, how do we set them up ?
To begin setting up light probes within our scene, the first thing we are going to want to do is jump into the hierarchy tab and create a light probe group.
Now can expand what looks like a web across the inside of our scene room. To do so the best way to do it is to access our scene view from a top perspective (Y-axis) using the scene gizmo. Go ahead and select edit light probes and we can begin setting up this light probe group.
Now lets change our view as described before, in order to make it easier for us to edit the Light Probes.
Now that we have an easy way to see things, similar to what we have done previously, we can simply duplicate the Light Probes and move them around as necessary.
With the Light Probes scattered across the room, we can go ahead and test it with an object. By adding a sphere, you’ll notice how some of the material on the sphere is darker than other parts. This is because that object is using the light probes as a guide to collect lighting information to really bring out some real-time lighting.
Light probes allow us to bounce light off of static objects to better give that realism lighting effect in real time. It can be used to show more lighter areas as opposed to darker areas within your scene.