Light Probes in Unity
Objective: Create a light probe group to illuminate non-static objects.
Lighting in Unity is usually baked into the scene because it involves computationally intensive ray tracing. This ray tracing is based upon static objects, like the red floor and grey wall, but how to pass the lighting information that is baked to a non-static object, i.e. one that move such as a player or the silver capsule. The solution is to use light probes. The placement of light probes is important. At each lighting transition, a lighting probe is needed on either side of the transition, for example along shadow lines as shown below. The lighting information is baked into the probe earlier, thus computationally expensive ray tracing is not needed when running the game.
Below we can see that as the silver capsule moves around the environment it is accessing different light probes, the black spheres connected via yellow lines, to define the lighting on the capsule. The lighting information is calculated from these nearest light probes.
A complex scene might have 1,000 lighting probes, but the game will run smoothly, even without a high end graphics card.
