Lights

There are two types of light in the Asset Library: a basic light which provides a cone spotlight and a beam light which includes some additional VFX to simulate the glow of the beam of a real stage light.

Lighting uses Unity's old Built-In Render Pipeline which most assets on the Unity Asset Store support. FirstStage is planned to support Unity's new High Definition Render Pipeline which will allow for physically based lighting.

FirstStage does not yet support realtime global illumination or other techniques to simulate light bouncing between surfaces.

Once you've placed a light, you can adjust it from the Lights panel on your WristPad.

For each light in the scene, there is a control strip. The first light on the desk is usually the Sun Light which is a simple directional light that illuminates the whole scene.

Each control strip has a slider to control the intensity of the light. These have a natural range of 0...1 but can be overdriven if desired. But be careful as these are not HDR lights and may well clip badly.

Each strip also has a button to enable automation recording which allows the light to change during the scene.

As well as automating the control sliders, you can also animate the position and orientation of the light. Using the Animator to animate in realtime can be particularly effective as you can keep a spotlight trained on a character, say, as they move around the scene.

Lighting Details

If you click on the header of the light strip, you can open out additional controls:

• Color

• Spot Angle

• Range

• Set whether the light casts shadows

You can also choose from a wide range of gobos (aka cookies) to put on the light: these can be very useful for simulating many different types of lighting effect.

The left hand column lists a set of tags for the gobos. Click on a tag to see gobos from that category.

At the top of the tags is a Clear button which will remove any gobo from the light.

On the right you can see the gobos: click on one to apply it to the light.