Unity HDRP Volume Framework - Lighting

1. Screen Space Ambient Occasion

Enable to add screen-space-based ambient occlusion to the scene.

2. Volumetrics

When enabled, it can add volumetric light effects to the lights and fog effects in the scene. If you want to improve the volume light quality, you can enable the High Quality option, but it will greatly increase the performance cost.

3. Light Layers

Enable/disable the Light Layers function here. This function allows the light sources in the scene to only illuminate the specified objects and ignore irrelevant objects.

4. Cookies (light mask)

Can be used in a variety of light sources to add realistic effects to lighting.

• Set the size and format of the cookie texture atlas, etc.
• Although increasing the cookie resolution will increase the memory usage, it can also improve the accuracy of the light and improve the rendering effect.

5. Reflections

• Screen Sapce Reflection: Enable/disable screen space based reflection effects. Related parameters can be adjusted in Screen Space Reflection Override.
• Compress Reflection Probe Cache compresses the reflection probe cache.
  Reflection Cubemap Size is used to set the resolution of the reflection probe Cubemap.
  Probe Cache Size can be used to set the maximum number of reflection Cubemaps that can be stored in the cache.
• Planar Reflection Probe is the same as above.
• Max Planar Reflection On Screen: The maximum number of Planar Reflection Probes that can be displayed on the same screen.
• Maximum Reflection On Screen: The maximum number of reflection probes that can be displayed on the same screen.

6. Sky

• Reflection Size: You can control the resolution of the skybox Cubemap used to calculate reflection information.

This resolution does not affect the quality of the skybox itself.

• Lighting Override Mask: Can separate ambient lighting from the sky background.
  If a Layer is specified here instead of using the default Nothing, then HDRP will look for the GameObject associated with this Layer in the scene. If the GameObject found contains a Volume component and can affect the current camera, then HDRP will use it The information in these volumes is used to calculate ambient lighting.

7. Shadow

• Shadowmask: Controls Shadowmask Lighting Mode enable/disable.
• Maximum Shadow on Screen: Used to control the maximum number of shadows displayed on the same screen. Shadows beyond the number of shadows set here are not rendered.
• Filtering Quality: Used to select the filtering quality of the shadows. Choose High Quality to improve shadow quality and reduce aliasing on shadow edges.
  In Forward and Both modes, you can choose between Low, Mediun and High quality. In Deferred mode, only Mediun quality.
• Screen Space Shadow: When enabled, HDRP computes screen space based shadows in a separate pass.
  Maximum: the maximum number of screen space shadows that the current project can handle;
  Buffer Format: used to select the cache save format for screen space shadows, you can choose R8G8B8A8 or R16G16B16A16;
• Use Contact Shadows: You can choose between Low, Mediun and High quality.
  Then, the available contact shadow quality can be selected in the Light component; in
  addition, the Contact Shadow option needs to be enabled in the Default Frame Setting;

Here are the shadow settings for different light types:

• Directional Light Shadow:
  

  • Directional Shadow Precision: Used to control shadow accuracy, 16bit uses less memory than 32bit, but sacrifices shadow resolution;
  • Directional Shadow Resolution Tiers: used to control the shadow resolution. For example, Low=256 means that the resolution of the Shadow Map is 256*256 pixels.
  • Max Shadow resolution: It is used to control the maximum resolution of Shadow Map; for
    example, if it is set to 2048 here, then even if we set Ultra in the shadow resolution level to 4096, it will eventually be displayed as 2048.

• Punctual Light Shadow (accurate light shadow): Punctual Light includes two types of light sources: Spot and Point.
  

  • Punctual Lights Atlas (accurate light source shadow texture atlas): Resolution (resolution) is used to control the resolution of shadow texture atlas; Precision (precision) is the same as directional light; when Dynamic is enabled, it automatically switches to use dynamic scaling shadow texture atlas .

  Note: Enabling dynamic scaling may cause shadows to flicker and jump in scenes with many light sources.

  • Directional Shadow Resolution Tiers: used to control the shadow resolution. For example, Low=256 means that the resolution of the Shadow Map is 256*256 pixels.
  • Max Shadow resolution: used to control the maximum resolution of Shadow Map;

• Area Light Shadow
  

  • Area Lights Atlas: Resolution (resolution) is used to control the resolution of the shadow texture atlas; Precision is the same as directional light; when Dynamic is enabled, it automatically switches to use the dynamic scaling shadow texture atlas .

  Note: Enabling dynamic scaling may cause shadows to flicker and jump in scenes with many light sources.

  • Directional Shadow Resolution Tiers: used to control the shadow resolution. For example, Low=256 means that the resolution of the Shadow Map is 256*256 pixels.
  • Max Shadow resolution: used to control the maximum resolution of Shadow Map;

8. Lights

• Maximum Directional on Screen: The maximum number of parallel lights that can appear in the same screen;
• Maximum Punctal on Screen: The maximum number of spotlights and point light sources that can appear in the same screen;
• Maximum Area on Screen: The maximum number of area lights that can appear in the same screen;