Source metadata
- Type: Official Unity Learn course material
- Maintainer: Unity Technologies
- Accessed: 2026-04-24
- Primary URL: Get started with lighting in Unity
Key takeaways
- Unity’s Creative Core lighting route introduces direct light, indirect light and global illumination before tool-specific settings.
- Real-time lights are calculated at runtime and can respond to moving objects and live scene changes.
- Baked lights are calculated before runtime and stored as lightmap data, which can reduce runtime cost.
- Unity teaches that real-time and baked lighting can be combined in one project.
- The course places lighting inside URP and later connects it to directional light, skybox, shadows, lightmaps, Light Probes and Reflection Probes.
Notable claims
- Unity Learn states that real-time lighting is calculated once per frame at runtime.
- Unity Learn explains baked lighting as pre-calculated lighting data stored as a lightmap.
- The source warns that baked lighting will not respond to live changes until lightmaps are rebaked.
Relevance
This source informs:
- unity-lighting-for-3d-scenes
- lighting-for-mood-and-guidance
- unity-urp-lighting-and-render-features
- overview-beginner-3d-game-development-route
Open questions raised
- How much lighting baking should first-year students do before they understand why static and dynamic objects behave differently?
- Should GDnD introduce Light Probes in the same lab as baked lighting, or in a later polish lab?