Lighting, Reflection, and Post Processing Effects

Welcome to Lighting, Reflection, and Post-Processing Effects, the second course in the Unity Certified 3D Artist Specialization from Unity Technologies.

The courses in this series will help you prepare for the Unity Certified 3D Artist exam, the professional certification for entry- to mid-level Unity artists. 3D artists are critical to the Unity development pipeline. They are a bridge between the programmers writing the application code and the designers or art directors who define the application’s aesthetics and style. In these courses, you will be challenged to complete realistic art implementation tasks in Unity that are aligned to the topics covered on the exam.

In this second course, you will continue work on the Kitchen Configurator application - an app that lets users view a realistic rendering of a kitchen and swap out objects and materials to customize the design. The scene will really start to come to life as you add lighting effects including ambient lighting from a custom skybox, simulated sunlight, interior lights, and realistic reflections. Finally, you’ll use Unity’s Post-Processing Stack to add even more polish to the rendered scene. By the end of the course, you’ll have a scene ready for the next stage: adding interactions through scripts.

This is an intermediate course, intended for people who are ready for their first paying roles as Unity 3D artists, or enthusiasts who would like to verify their skills against a professional standard. To succeed, you should have at least 1-2 years of experience implementing 3D art in Unity. You should be proficient at importing assets into Unity from Digital Content Creation (DCC) tools, prototyping scenes, working with lighting, and adding particles and effects. You should also have a basic understanding of 2D asset management, animation, and working with scripts. You should have experience in the full product development lifecycle, and understand multi-platform development, including for XR (AR and VR) platforms.

• Lighting with a Skybox
• Welcome to the course. In this first section, you’ll be introduced to the Challenge/Solution format of this course, and then take on your first challenge: creating a custom skybox to use in the Kitchen Configurator project.
• Creating Lights and Configuring Lighting Settings
• In this module, you'll continue to add realistic lighting effects to the Kitchen Configurator application, this time bringing in multiple interior and exterior lights of different types, and configuring the project lighting settings to balance aesthetics with performance.
• Tuning Reflection
• By fine-tuning the reflection probes in the project, you'll add that extra polish to the experience to help the kitchen scene appear all the more realistic.
• Creating Post-Processing Effects
• The Unity Post-Processing Stack can be used to create advanced cinematic-style camera and visual effects without complicating coding or shaders. In this session, you’ll use the Post-Processing Stack to implement a vignette effect and enhance the scene’s shadows.
• Course Final Project
• Now that you've had practice lighting the Kitchen Configurator scene, apply your scene layout and lighting skills to another project. You'll select a lighting reference image, apply the light to a scene, and submit images of your scene for peer review.