Unity offers a variety of light sources, such as Directional, Spot, Point, and Area lights, that can produce realistic, real-time shadows.

Additionally, the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) offer physically accurate lighting attenuation that matches real-world light behaviors.

HDRP supports industry-standard Physical Light Units (PLU) such as Lux, Lumen, and EV for the entire lighting and exposure pipeline, enabling both beginners and professionals to light scenes in a more consistent manner.

Unity’s hybrid ray tracing in HDRP helps to refine your project’s realism. Harness incredible levels of shadowing quality to create tinted and semi-transparent shadows for translucent objects.

A convincing Global Illumination (GI) solution is at the heart of every believable 3D render. Unity’s Progressive Lightmapper (CPU & GPU) helps you simulate the diffuse light bouncing off static surfaces and baking the results into lightmaps and Light Probes.

Unity offers a Realtime GI solution using Enlighten to ensure that real-time lights can also produce convincing light bounces while also allowing for runtime modifications of lights and materials.

For real-time GI without any precomputation, look into HDRP’s ray-tracing capabilities, which take advantage of the latest GPUs. Ray-Traced Global Illumination and Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion provide better results compared to their screen space counterparts.

In order to capture and project reflections onto the environment, Unity relies on several techniques. The most common for real-time applications are Reflection Probes, which harness image-based lighting.

HDRP offers Planar Reflection Probes, which are particularly well-suited to simulating real-time reflections on flat surfaces such as mirrors and water planes. Another technique called Screen Space Reflections (SSR) relies on the data available in the frame to simulate reflections more accurately than Reflection Probes in certain scenarios, particularly for surfaces parallel to the camera such as floors and walls.

Ray-Traced Reflections can push realism even further in dynamic scenarios that cannot rely primarily on precomputed reflections and screen space techniques.

Want to create beautiful sunsets, ominous clouds, or dense mist? Unity supports multiple types of sky, from the simpler gradient and HDRI skies used for static skies, to physically based procedural skies that can simulate different times of day.

Volumetric Clouds* can help you increase the dynamism of your skies to create jaw-dropping weather conditions, from awe-inspiring sunrises to stormy afternoons.

To increase the perception of depth in your scene and produce denser atmosphere, you can use the traditional Fog available in all render pipelines or push the immersion further with the more advanced global Volumetric Fog and Local Volumetric Fog available in HDRP.

* Currently available in HDRP only

Unity provides professional color grading tools to let you easily express your creative freedom, from simple color filters and contrast adjustments to externally generated LUT (Look up tables).

You can simulate more advanced camera and film effects such as Depth of Field, Vignette, Motion Blur, and Film Grain. These techniques can produce a more cinematic look that mimics the artefacts of lenses and film.

The HDRP and URP feature their own post-processing systems, whereas the Built-In Render Pipeline relies on the Post Processing Stack v2 package.