Light Mode: Mixed

This page describes the behavior of a Light component when you set its Mode property to Mixed. These are also known as Mixed Lights.

Mixed Lights combine elements of both realtime and baked lighting. You can use Mixed Lights to combine dynamic shadows with baked lighting from the same light source, or when you want a light to contribute direct realtime lighting and baked indirect lighting.

To use Mixed Lights, you must first understand the benefits and limitations of Realtime Lights and Baked Lights.

Mixed Light behavior

• The behavior of all Mixed Lights in a Scene depends on the Lighting Mode setting in the Lighting window. The different Lighting Modes have very different performance characteristics, and different levels of visual fidelity. For more information, see Lighting Modes.
• You can change properties of Mixed Lights at runtime. This updates their real-time lighting but not their baked lighting. When doing this, take care to avoid unwanted visual effects.

Limitations of Mixed Lights

• The performance cost of Mixed Lights differs considerably, depending on the Lighting Mode. However, because Mixed Lights always combine at least some realtime and some baked lighting, Mixed Lights always involve more runtime calculations than fully baked lighting, and higher memory usage than fully real-time lighting.

Note that if you disable Baked Global Illumination in your Scene, Unity forces Mixed Lights to behave as though you set their Mode to Realtime. When this happens, Unity displays a warning on the Light component Inspector.