My journey becoming a Unity game developer: Make a game look beautiful-URP and Lights

Objective: Using Point lights and Spotlights to illuminate specific areas we want the player to focus on.

Final results of Point lights and Spotlights targeting particular areas in the Control Room.

With our Control Room dark right now, we want to add lights to areas where we want the player to take notice of or interact with. Two of the lights we’re going to use in this scene are Point Lights and Spotlights. Point lights are located at a point in the scene and emits light in all directions equally. Spotlights on the other hand are located at a point in the scene and emits light, but in a cone shape.

Let’s start by adding Point lights at the terminal’s positions. Before we add a Point light, let’s organize the lights under an Empty game object name — Lighting — . Inside the Lighting object, create a new Point light and position the light slightly above the middle of a terminal. Use the Range, Color, and Intensity to adjust the look of the Point light on the terminal.

Point light positioned with properties adjusted over a terminal.

Now duplicate the Point light and place them over the other terminals in the scene.

Point lights positioned over the rest of the terminals.

Duplicate another Point light and position it in front of the main door to the Control Room. Also, duplicate one more Point light and position it towards the upper middle area of the Support Struts. Increase the Range and Intensity to cover the lower area of the Support Struts.

Point lights added to the main door and Support Struts.

Next, we’re going to use the Spotlight to focus on the Test tubes. Create a Spotlight and position it on one side of the stairs. Use the Rotation in Transform, Range, Color, Inner/Outer Spot Area, and Intensity to adjust the Spotlight. Make sure the have the Spotlight illuminate the Test tubes to stand out. Duplicate the Spotlight 2 more times and position them on the other side of the stairs and above the middle terminal focusing on the Test tubes.

Spotlights added to illuminate the 3 Test tubes in the scene.

We will notice that our Point lights are leaving a shiny reflection on the floors. We will do 2 things to remove this shine by first clicking on the floor that has a reflection on it in the scene. In the Inspector, go to the Shader and adjust the Smoothness to remove the shine. This will make changes to all the prefab floors tiles of this object type.

Also, we can change the Point light’s Light Mode from Real Time to Mixed as this will perform some calculations in advance and some calculations at runtime. Plus, we can change the Shadow Type from Soft Shadows to No Shadows.

Removed the reflection of the light from the floors.

This is the finished result for now.