Light probes in Unity, what are they?
As stated before, newer graphics cards have some wonderful hardware that will go far as to raytrace lighting so you get really nice realistic illumination and shadows. However this is extremely mathematically intensive and not everyone has the proper hardware to implement these technologies, especially when you’re designing for mobile. Fortunately, Unity has come up with a way to fake dynamic lighting in the form of light probes.
Light probes are a coordination of lights that will pick up baked lighting information and relay it to dynamic objects. Anywhere we want to acknowledge dynamic appearance/light data share with objects. Put a light probe
Similar to light maps, light probes store the lighting information in a scene but unlike light maps that store information that hit surfaces, light probes store information that passes through space.
When you create a light probe, there’s these spheres you can move around to help create the path. Each sphere takes in the color and light of the area around it and stores it to emit onto any dynamic object that passes through it. Think of it as Unity storing just color picker information instead of figuring out each areas texture on polygons in real time. This seems like an incredibly efficient method of giving the appearance of ambient light, but with far less real time mathematics to slow the game down!
It’s said this tool is rarely used but I believe I will be taking advantage of this efficient and mobile friendly tool myself in the future!
