Lighting - Overview

Light Modes and Types

Lighting for Static Objects

Light Probes

Shadows

Demo: Baked Lighting

Lighting is one of the most important aspects of real-time 3D visuals. It can set the mood, guide interactions, and identify goals and objectives. In this project, you will learn about and compare the differences between the available lights and light modes that you can use in your 3D mobile application.

Lighting

Course Introduction

The Optimization Process

Profiling Tools

Geometry - Introduction 

Triangle and Polygon Usage

Level of Detail

Additional Geometry Best Practices

Demo: Level of Detail

Textures - Introduction

Texture Size, Color Space, and Compression

Texture Atlases

Texture Filtering

Mipmapping

UV Unwrap, Visual Impact, and Texture Channel Packing

Alpha Channels and Normal Map Best Practices

Editing Texture Settings

Demo: Texture Atlases

Shaders and Materials - Overview

Optimizing Shaders for Mobile Platforms

Transparencies

Additional Material and Shader Best Practices

Demo: Draw Calls and SRP Batcher

Conclusion/Next Steps

Welcome to 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications! In this introductory project, we will review the course's main learning objectives, discuss the practice of optimization, and identify the optimization tools available at your disposal.

Introduction/Optimization and Profiling

This project will highlight optimizations for 3D models that can make a game more efficient while maintaining aesthetic intent, improving the performance and experience on mobile devices. 

Geometry

This project will highlight the different implementation considerations and optimizations that take advantage of a Texture’s flexibility. When given the correct settings and applied correctly over their many use cases, Textures play a major role in achieving your desired visual effects. 

Textures

Shaders and Materials play a crucial role in determining how target hardware will process and render your 3D objects. In this project, you will explore best practices that will keep the shaders lightweight and fast when running on phones with limited resources.

Shaders and Materials

ARMUnityMobileOptimization.zip

In this intermediate course, participants will learn how to produce performance-optimized 3D assets and scenes for mobile applications. Topics will cover tips on optimizing Geometry, Textures, Materials, Shaders, and Lighting. This course was created with technical artists and content creators in mind.

Arm & Unity Presents: 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications

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Overview

Before You Begin

What to Watch For

Conclusion

When possible, it is a best practice to identify the static objects in your 3D mobile application in order to light them correctly and efficiently. In this demo, we will compare the performance between baked and non-baked lighting.

In a previous tutorial, you learned about the benefits of implementing baked lighting in your 3D Scenes. In this demo, you will profile two sample Scenes and compare the difference in performance between baked and unbaked lighting.

If you haven’t done so, download the course project that contains the sample demos here. When prompted by the pop-up, click on either the Lighting Demo - Non-baked or Lighting Demo - Baked. 

You can also open the sample Scene in the Project view (Assets > 4 Lighting > Scene > Lighting_Baked or Assets > 4 Lighting > Scene > Lighting_Unbaked). Once downloaded and open, you can either enter Play Mode in the Editor or build this Scene to your mobile device to profile in the Profiler. 

As discussed in a previous tutorial, the Unity engine offers three options for generating lightmaps - Enlighten, the Progressive CPU lightmapper, and the Progressive GPU lightmapper. For this project, we chose the Progressive CPU lightmapper as Enlighten is being deprecated and the Progressive GPU lightmapper is in preview. 

When implementing baked lighting using the Progressive CPU lightmapper, you will save CPU cycles when processing lighting information. As a result, you may see a large increase in frames per second (FPS) while seeing a decrease in CPU usage. You should see a significant difference in the Statistics Window when measuring FPS between the two Scenes.

Where the differences will really show is on your mobile device. Build the sample Scene to your phone of choice and profile the two Scenes while watching the Total CPU graph in the Profiler’s Global Illumination section. Depending on your phone’s specs, you should see a large difference in CPU usage. 

(Note: While we opted for the Progressive CPU lightmapper, we encourage you to experiment and profile with the Progressive GPU lightmapper. Depending on your system's GPU, performance may vary.)

Lights accentuate features in your mobile application that, alone, could be overlooked or underappreciated. When making lighting decisions, choose wisely between static and non-static lights, as this choice will determine if your application lives up to expectations and performs efficiently on your target device.

Congratulations! You have completed this course on 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications! Continue on to the last project, where we’ll briefly discuss next steps and additional resources that will help you in your game-development journey.

Demo: Baked Lighting

1. Overview

2. Before You Begin

3. What to Watch For

4. Conclusion

Complete this tutorial