Version: 2022.1
Light Probes
Light Probe Groups

Light Probes: Technical information

The lighting information in the light probesLight probes store information about how light passes through space in your scene. A collection of light probes arranged within a given space can improve lighting on moving objects and static LOD scenery within that space. More info
See in Glossary
are encoded as Spherical Harmonics basis functions. We use third order polynomials, also known as L2 Spherical Harmonics. These are stored using 27 floating point values, 9 for each color channel.

The EnlightenA lighting system by Geomerics used in Unity for lightmapping and for Enlighten Realtime Global Illumination. More info
See in Glossary
Global IlluminationA group of techniques that model both direct and indirect lighting to provide realistic lighting results.
See in Glossary
implementation in Unity uses a different spherical harmonics approach than Geomerics, the feature’s original developer, namely the notation and reconstruction method from Peter-Pike Sloan’s paper, Stupid Spherical Harmonics (SH) Tricks. Geomerics’ original approach was based on the notation and reconstruction method from Ramamoorthi/Hanrahan’s paper, An Efficient Representation for Irradiance Environment Maps.

The shaderA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary
code for reconstruction is found in UnityCG.cginc and is using the method from Appendix A10 Shader/CPU code for Irradiance Environment Maps from Peter-Pikes paper.

The data is internally ordered like this:

                        [L00:  DC]

            [L1-1:  y] [L10:   z] [L11:   x]

  [L2-2: xy] [L2-1: yz] [L20:  zz] [L21:  xz]  [L22:  xx - yy]

The 9 coefficients for R, G and B are ordered like this:

L00, L1-1,  L10,  L11, L2-2, L2-1,  L20,  L21,  L22, // red channel

L00, L1-1,  L10,  L11, L2-2, L2-1,  L20,  L21,  L22, // blue channel

L00, L1-1,  L10,  L11, L2-2, L2-1,  L20,  L21,  L22  // green channel

For more “under-the-hood” information about Unity’s light probe system, you can read Robert Cupisz’s talk from GDC 2012, Light Probe Interpolation Using Tetrahedral Tessellations”, GDC 2012


  • 2017–06–08 Page published

  • Light Probes updated in 5.6

Light Probes
Light Probe Groups
Copyright © 2023 Unity Technologies
优美缔软件(上海)有限公司 版权所有
"Unity"、Unity 徽标及其他 Unity 商标是 Unity Technologies 或其附属机构在美国及其他地区的商标或注册商标。其他名称或品牌是其各自所有者的商标。
公安部备案号:
31010902002961