What you'll learn

In this series of tutorials, we will explore the key components to creating high-quality lighting in your Unity games. We are going to approach lighting in Unity in a traditional way to help you understand exactly what's going on when we introduce new elements in each lesson. We'll start out by learning how to create and implement a custom skybox because the skybox influences so many other areas of your environmental lighting. After that, we'll learn about direct and indirect lighting and how they are applied in Unity without greatly affecting the performance of our game. Then we'll start to explore some great features Unity has to offer to help optimize the performance of our game without completely sacrificing quality, like light probes, reflection probes, emissive lights and the light optimization tools. Finally, we'll wrap up the course by discussing what is happening under the hood to allow you to begin exploring in your own projects. Software required: Unity 5.0.1.