My journey becoming a Unity game developer: Environment & Lighting-Emission Channel
Objective: Adding emission to a material to make it appear as a visible source of light from the game object.
Emissions is basically a light from an object not using light source, but using light data from a texture or color. Emission is useful when you want some part of a game object to appear lit from the inside, by using the emission properties you can control the color and intensity of light that the surface of a Material emits.
We will start off with the Display Case Wood. To make a Material emissive, go down in the material’s Shader and enable the Emission checkbox. This will expose the Color and Global Illumination properties. The Color setting specifies the color and intensity of the emission. Click the Color box to open the HDR Color picker. Here you can alter the color of the illumination and the Intensity of the emission.
Global Illumination specifies how the light that this Material emits affects the environmental lighting of other nearby game objects. There are 3 options to choose from:
Realtime: This means that this emissive light affects the illumination of nearby game objects, including ones that are moving in real-time.
Baked: This Material affects the lighting of nearby static game objects, but not dynamic game objects.
None: It does not illuminate or affect other game objects. The Material itself does have the emission color.
Now let’s check out the texture map for this case by clicking on the little circle next to Emission. Select the DisplayCaseWood texture to add it to the case. If we look at this texture, we will notice that the artist who made this texture in another 3D program baked the cabinet and light so Unity can read the data from this texture and know where to add light. Light will be added to the top, bottom rim of the cabinet, and the very bottom of the cabinet.
After adding the DisplayCaseWood texture to Color, click on the HDR Color picker. Come down to Intensity and use the slider to adjust the intensity of the color. You will notice that the areas of the case that the texture map highlighted in white are the areas that are illuminating which is the top rim of the case and the area the objects are laying on inside the case. These will stand out more when we use the directional light as the sun and light probes with the Emission Channel.
Emission is useful when you want some part of a game object to appear lit from the inside. Objects that use emissive Materials appear to remain bright even in dark areas of a scene.
