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Introduction to HDRP Lights

Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) Lighting allows you to enhance your project’s visual appeal with ease. It uses a hybrid of Deferred and Forward Rendering Paths along with Tile and Cluster Renderers that allow the lighting to scale better than if you’re just using Unity’s built-in Rendering. In this tutorial, you will learn about HDRP and using it to light scenes. 

This tutorial has been verified using Unity 2019 LTS

Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) lighting allows you to enhance your project’s visual appeal with ease. It uses a hybrid of Deferred and Forward Rendering Paths along with Tile and Cluster Renderers that allow the lighting to scale better than if you’re just using Unity’s built-in Rendering. In this tutorial, we will go over the HDRP light types and briefly discuss the light components properties.

Introduction to High Definition Render Pipeline Lighting

HDRP comes with a new lighting architecture as it uses a hybrid of Deferred and Forward Rendering Paths along with Tile and Cluster Renderers. This combination means lighting scales better than if you’re using the built-in Unity Rendering. This new architecture is focused on performance while bringing a new level of quality and accuracy to your Scene.

HDRP comes with new light properties and a new light Editor that allows you to do things like fade the light, affect only diffuse or specular lighting, and use color temperature to set the lighting color. With HDRP, you can control the inner angles and shapes of Spot Lights. HDRP also supports colored cookies and allows the use of real-time area lights. 

: HDRP removed the Built-in Unity ‘Gamma Mode’ and uses the precise ‘Linear Mode’.

Lighting Improvements

 With HDRP, the Light Component — which controls the shape, color, and intensity of the light and whether the light will cast shadows in your scene — comes with some more advanced settings. 

1. Go to the GameObject dropdown and select 

2. Ensure the new Point Light you created is selected.

3. Go to the Inspector Window and expand all the hidden fields (

As you can see, there are quite a few settings. We’ll break this down into bite-sized chunks, beginning with the Features Section (

HDRP Light Settings

Use this section to change the type of light being used, its mode, and Layer default.

: The current type of light. The possible values are Spot, Directional, Point, Rectangle, and Tube.

: Specifies the light mode used to determine if and how the light will be baked. Possible values are Realtime, Mixed, and Baked.

General Section

Use the Shape section to change the shape of your light (

: Use this dropdown to select the shape of your Light. You can choose from the following: Directional Lights, Point Lights, Rectangle, and Spot. When selecting a light, it’ll add/remove settings for each specific light type. 

determines the shape of your Spot Light. 

 determines the angle of the light in degrees. 

 determines where the attenuation between the inner cone and the outer cone starts. Higher values will cause the light at the edges of the Spot to fade out, while lower values will prevent the light from fading at the edges. 

sets the radius of the light source. This effects the falloff of diffuse lighting, the spread of specular highlight, and the softness of raytraced shadows. 

, the Inner Percent changes to Aspect Ratio, which adjusts the aspect ratio of the Pyramids light project, a value of 1 results in a square. If the Shape is set to Box, Inner Percent and Spot Angle are replaced with Size X and Size Y, which determines the size of the box or rectangular light being emitted.

 controls the size of the highlight of the sun disk which is the angle of the sun cone in degrees. 

 controls the size of the halo around the highlight of the sun disk. 

 determines the aspect of the specular highlight in order to mimic an area light. This allows you to avoid very sharp specular highlights that don’t match the shape of the light source.

 which determines the length of the Line Light.

Shape Section

Use this section to control if the light will use volumetrics and if so, adjust the density of it and how dim you want the shadows to be.

When enabled, the light will use volumetrics.

Controls the density of the scattered volumetric lighting.

 Dims the volumetric shadows that this light casts.

Volumetrics Section

Use the following settings to adjust the way shadows appear in your scene from the selected Light (

: Enables shadows on this light. Tube and Rectangular lights do not cast shadows, while Directional casts cascaded shadows which can be controlled in the scene settings.

 Specifies when HDRP updates the shadow map.

: Use this to set the resolution of the shadows cast by this light. A higher resolution increases the fidelity of the shadows at the cost of GPU performance.

: Use this to set the distance from the light at which objects start casting shadows.

Specifies the behavior of the Shadowmask when using mixed lighting. Distance Shadowmask uses HDRP real-time shadows to Shadow Distance and baked shadows after. Shadowmask is used for static shadow casters which are always baked.

Shadows Section

The HDRP offers many new features and options that bring that AAA lighting to your projects. It’s important to understand how the light component is more robust than before to really bring that believable atmosphere to your scenes. HDRP also gives you much more control over light behavior within each Scene.

Unity Version 2019.4