Lighting in the Universal Render Pipeline

Using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), you can achieve realistic lighting that is suitable for a range of art styles.

All of Unity's render pipelines share common lighting functionality, but each render pipeline has some important differences.

Areas where the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) differs from Unity's common lighting functionality are:

• The Light component inspector, which displays some URP-specific controls.
• The Universal Additional Light Data component, which allows Unity to store Light-related data that is specific to URP.
• Enlighten Realtime Global Illumination is supported in URP from version 12. For more information, see the forum post Update on Global Illumination 2021.

For a full comparison of lighting features between Unity's Built-in Render Pipeline and URP, and an up to date list of lighting features that are currently under research, see this feature comparison chart.

For a general introduction to lighting in Unity and examples of common lighting workflows, see the Lighting section of the Unity Manual.