How to make many small blinking lights

Questions & Answers
1

I am using Unity free version and targeting web player. I want to put lots of small flashing lights in my scene, probably in the order of 50 - 100.

Should I use point lights and deferred rendering or is it better to use spheres with emissive materials or is there another way I haven't thought of?

Thanks.

2

Emissive materials don't actually emit light onto anything in the scene (this may not be the case with Best and Unity Pro; I don't know for sure, but it has no real-time lighting effect). If you need actual lights, then point light are appropriate. 50-100 should probably make for very poor framerates, however, even on machines that are currently considered fast.

Otherwise, if you're not actually talking about lighting, but rather, things that "look bright", you perhaps should just use a shader that displays a solid color. Very cheap to do, especially if you can batch them, which is likely.

Shader "Blinkin' Beacon" {

Properties {
    _Color ("Color", Color) = (1,1,1)
}

SubShader {
    Color [_Color]
    Pass{}
} 

}

Try keeping the same hue and saturation, and altering the value. (Multiply all three color channels by the same <= 1 amount.)

3

I would recommend adding particles.

4

I usually use particles with very low start speed and control them through the emitter’s shape… it’s true that adds on hardware resources but I couldn’t find a better solution…