5 Great Tools for Lighting Setup in Unity

1. Fast Shadow Receiver

This week's Unity Digest opens with a useful tool called Fast Shadow Receiver. It makes shadow rendering much faster by minimizing the area where shadows are drawn. This is the real solution to the shadow performance problem on mobile devices. The tool also provides a useful mesh search tree called Mesh Tree, which is used to search for polygons that are receiving shadows.

The tool's features:

• Lightmaps and Shadowmasks are available in Projector materials.
• Works with Lightweight Render Pipeline.
• Easy Setup Wizard.
• Works with Blob Shadow Projector.
• Also works with Light Projector/Bullet Marks.
• Shadow-map is also supported.
• It can cast shadows on non-flat surfaces.

2. Magic Mirror Pro – Recursive Edition

Next up, we have Magic Mirror Pro – Recursive Edition, the first asset to provide proper recursive reflections. Using clever math, shaders, and scripting, the tool creates recursive reflections that look fantastic and perform well.

Features:

• Unity 5.6.5+ is supported.
• Properly renders shadows on all levels of recursion.
• Includes a fix for recursive water reflection.
• Supported on HTC Vive.

3. IESLighting

The third tool we chose for you is the first IES (Illuminating Engineering Society) Lighting in the Unity world. This tool uses light cookies made from cubemaps to create IES standard lighting.

The tool's key features:

• Make 3D cubemap cookie for point light from various IES files to form IES lighting in real-time;
• The capability to load IES files from local device or web server dynamically;
• An editor tool to create cubemap cookies for point light;
• Compatible with IESNA 1981,1986, 1995, 2002;
• Can be embedded in your own project, or software.

4. Projector Simulator

Tool number four accurately simulates video projectors to enable images, videos, and RenderTextures to be projected realistically and in real-time.

What's inside:

• Custom shader-based implementation (2017.4 and later)
• Adjustable projector resolution for optimal performance
• Most if not all platforms should support the new shader
• Adjustable lens shift, aspect ratio, lens ratio, brightness, keystone
• HDRP support (2018.4 and later), and more.

5. Smart Lighting 2D

And last but not least we have Smart Lighting 2D, a winner of the Best Development Tool in the Unity Awards 2019. This powerful tool allows to create multiple lightmaps with personalized light logic.

The tool's key features:

• Flawless Customer Support (Unity 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
• Mobile-Friendly (Great performance on Android & iOS devices)
• No GC calls after initialization (Great memory management)
• Cross-platform (Switch/iOS/Android/WebGL/macOS/Linux/PS4/Xbox)
• HDR Support
• Shader Graph Support