Unity Tech Art: Realistic Lighting For Game Development
What you'll learn
- Complete A to Z of lighting in Unity
- Enhance your 3D game worlds with clever lighting strategies
- Build fast and efficient lighting setups for early prototyping of games
- Build complex lighting setups with direct lighting and global illumination
- Customize stock or Asset Store assets through lighting
- Create dramatic cinematic atmosphere using lighting
- Creating shader effects using the visual ShaderGraph editor
Course content
- Preview02:06
- Preview06:57
- 01:00Lighting Basics Project
- 05:38Unity Versions
Requirements
- Unity 2018.2 and later
- Basic working knowledge of the Unity Editor
Description
2019 Update: Check out our new Section on the ShaderGraph! Creating shaders can now be done without writing a single line of code!
Making your Unity games look amazing is easier than you think. You don't need to be great at programming and don't need incredible 3D art skills.
Creating immersive games starts with understanding the secrets of lighting and being able to squeeze maximum value from your technical art pipeline.
This course assumes that you're a little bit familiar with Unity but doesn't require you to have any programming or art experience. We will take you through Unity's lighting toolset and discuss everything from colour theory to shadows to materials that emit light.
More specifically, the course will start off with basic light set ups such as a single point light and build up to complex lighting setups. Among other things, the course covers:
Direct realtime lighting including directional lights, point lights and spotlights.
Global illumination theory and principles, both realtime and baked (pre-rendered).
Emissive materials and how they can be used to make specific items in your scene stand out.
Three- and four-point lighting set ups - how to create them, how to vary them and how to use them for different effects in your games.
ShaderGraph: get started using Unity's visual editor for creating shaders!
We follow a project-and-challenge approach which means you don't just sit there and watch us, you follow along and flex your own creative muscles to create interesting game moments. We all learn best by doing (rather than just watching)!
You will also be asked to take on a bigger challenge and light your own scene. This serves as a great portfolio piece, or just something to show yourself what you're capable of once you've finished the course.
Unity is a fantastic engine which enables you to make production-quality games. Furthermore these games can be created for Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Web from a single source!
This course is perfect for programmers who want to make their game more interesting, for 3D artists who want to triple how amazing their artwork looks, designers who dream of creating cinematic moments worthy of AAA games, and anyone else who is interested in leveling up their tech art skills.
Get plugged into our communities of amazing developers on Facebook (nearly 20k), in our own TA-curated Community (17k views/day), and our student chat group (10k live at any one time).
Come and join us in this course now - you'll be amazed at what you're capable of creating!
Note: the project files for this course have been updated to use Unity 2019 with version 2 of the PostProcessing stack. We recommend that you complete the using Unity 2019 or above.
Who this course is for:
- Unity developers (or anyone) interested in 3d art
- Beginning 3d technical artists interested in Unity3d
- No programming or scripting is required for this course!
Featured review
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Instructors
- 4.7 Instructor Rating
- 3,469 Reviews
- 24,479 Students
- 7 Courses
Wilmer Lin is a 3D and visual effects artist with over fifteen years of industry experience in film and television. He has trained tens of thousands students over the course of a decade.
Now an independent game developer and educator, Wilmer helps aspiring gamedevs learn technical art and the craft of programming, using Unity3D, Maya and Photoshop.
- 4.6 Instructor Rating
- 159,888 Reviews
- 707,165 Students
- 15 Courses
Rick Davidson has been making video games for a living for more than 14 years as a Designer, Producer, Creative Director, and Executive Producer, creating games for console, mobile, PC and Facebook. He founded an Indie game studio, Inspirado Games, which was acquired in 2012 by Electronic Arts / PopCap. He has worked on cool IPs such as Mario, Transformers, Captain America and Mortal Kombat and created successful new IPs from scratch (such as "GardenMind" which was nominated for Canadian Game of the Year in the social / mobile category).
As a qualified Career Coach, Rick has helped thousands of people achieve their dream of making games for a living - both as Indie Game Developers and as valuable game industry employees.