Lighting & Rendering Services for Games

Lighting and Rendering

Picture this: a lighting artist spends an hour baking lightmaps, checks the result, spots an artifact at the seam between two meshes, fixes the UVs, and bakes again. Another hour. If a project runs this way, release dates slip faster than development can catch up. Lighting is one of those areas where choosing the wrong approach early costs dearly at the finish line.

We handle lighting setup for Unity and Unreal projects: from strategy selection (baked, realtime, mixed) to debugging specific artifacts in finished scenes.

Realtime, Static, and Mixed Lighting

Before reaching for tools, you need a lighting model. In Unity, these are three modes for each light source:

Common mistake we see regularly: a studio sets all lighting to Realtime because "it's simpler," then ends up with a scene running 12 shadow-casting lights on screen. On mobile platforms, this is a guaranteed performance failure. On PC, it pushes the shadow pipeline to its limits.

Mixed Lighting with Subtractive or Shadowmask mode is the working compromise for most projects. Static objects get baked shadows, dynamic objects cast realtime shadows from the same sources.

Deeper: Baked Lighting Optimization

This is where the most time gets lost—and where we can save the most.

Enlighten vs. Progressive Lightmapper

Unity supports two backends for baking:

• Enlighten — the legacy engine, works in realtime, but delivers less accurate GI. Formally outdated, but still used on mobile platforms due to low runtime update costs.
• Progressive Lightmapper (CPU/GPU) — modern path-tracing backend. GPU variant on a decent card runs 5–10× faster than CPU variant. This is our default for PC and console projects.

Key Progressive Lightmapper parameters that affect bake time:

Lightmap Resolution:    10–20 texels/unit for most scenes
Max Bounces:            2–4 (not 8, the default)
Samples (Direct):       32–64
Samples (Indirect):     512–1024
Denoiser:               OIDN (Intel) or OptiX (NVIDIA)

A denoiser is essential. Without it, thousands of samples are needed for clean results. With denoising, 256–512 samples suffice, turning iterations from hours into minutes.

Common Artifacts and Their Causes

Bright seams between objects. Root cause: inconsistent UV islands at boundaries. Solution: set Stitch Seams correctly in mesh settings or use Auto UV Charts with padding (Pack Margin).

Dark spots at object bases. Usually: collider intersecting the floor. Enlighten/Progressive treats geometry intersection as an enclosed area and darkens it. Solution: raise the object 0.01–0.05 units or configure Backface Tolerance properly.

Light bleeding at lightmap atlas seams. Happens when UV islands from different objects sit too close in the atlas. Solution: increase Pack Margin, or manually place large objects in separate atlases via Lightmap Parameters.

Scene Organization for Fast Baking

Large scene scale is the main enemy of speed. Several rules:

1. Objects smaller than 0.5 units shouldn't be included in baking—they get lighting via Light Probes.
2. Repeating objects (trees, rocks, fences) should use Instanced Meshes—they share one UV atlas.
3. Terrain bakes separately with reduced resolution (2–5 texels/unit)—lightmap detail on ground isn't perceived anyway.

Light Probes and Reflection Probes

Light Probes give dynamic objects (characters, enemies, pickups) the illusion of baked lighting without actual lightmaps. Space probes densely: one every 2–4 meters in areas with lighting changes. Too sparse placement causes harsh jumps in illumination as characters move.

Probe Volumes (available Unity 2022+, HDRP) replace manual probe placement with volumetric grids. For large outdoor scenes, this saves significant artist time.

Reflection Probes solve another problem—correct reflections on PBR materials. Without them, metallic and mirror surfaces reflect the skybox instead of the environment, immediately reading as low quality. Setup:

• Baked type for static interiors
• Realtime type for small zones with changing environment (e.g., a TV in a room)
• Proper Box Projection tuning for accurate room geometry reflection

Post-processing: SSAO and SSR

Not strictly part of the lighting system, but both techniques critically affect perceived depth and render quality.

SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) adds darkening in crevices, corners, and contact points between objects and surfaces. In URP, it's the Ambient Occlusion component in Volume. In HDRP, use Ambient Occlusion with Ray Tracing configured for console and PC projects.

Common mistake: too high Radius and Intensity, creating a dirty, blurred darkening across the scene. Effective values for most projects: Radius 0.5–1.5, Intensity 1.0–2.0.

SSR (Screen Space Reflections) provides dynamic reflections on horizontal surfaces (floors, water, wet asphalt). It only works with what's visible on screen—both a limitation and a performance advantage over cube-map reflections. In HDRP, configure via Screen Space Reflection in Volume Profile; in URP, use the Screen Space Reflection Renderer Feature.

What This Service Includes

• Audit current lighting system: identify bottlenecks in bake time and runtime performance
• Configure Mixed Lighting for your platform and genre
• Optimize UV layout for lightmaps
• Place and tune Light Probe and Reflection Probe grids
• Configure post-processing (SSAO, SSR, Bloom, Tonemapping) for your game's style
• Profile lighting via Unity Frame Debugger and RenderDoc

Already have a scene with issues? Send screenshots and a description—in most cases, the problem source is immediately apparent.