We’re excited to introduce Lighting Search in Unity 6.5, a new workflow in the Unity Editor designed to make it easier to manage lighting-related data in complex scenes.
By bringing powerful search, filtering, and editing capabilities into one place, Lighting Search is intended to help you iterate faster and work more confidently at scale. It also addresses several long-standing pain points in Light Explorer, offering a more flexible and efficient experience for everyday lighting workflows.
As you begin trying it out, we’d love to hear your feedback here in this thread, so that we can help guide future improvements.
Built on Unity’s Search framework, Lighting Search provides a table-based interface for finding, inspecting, and batch-editing lighting-related objects and data.
Quick Start
- Access via Window > Rendering > Lighting Search
- Explore pre-built queries in the tree panel
- Switch to a Lightmaps query to view auto-exposed baked Lightmaps with adjustable exposure
- Multi-select rows for bulk editing
- Save queries as assets for reuse
Lighting Search provides a comprehensive tabular interface to visualize lighting data.
Pre-built queries are organized in a tree on the left panel, with 100+ queries covering various lighting data. Table cells are directly editable, with multi-edit support.
- Lights: Search and edit all light types including HDRP shapes. Modify mode, intensity (with automatic unit conversion), color temperature, and rendering layers. HDRP users can adjust shadow resolution, contact shadows, and ray tracing settings.
- Mesh Renderers: Manage GI contribution and reception, reflection probe usage, and rendering layers across scene objects.
- Reflection Probes: Configure probe modes and resolutions.
- Adaptive Probe Volumes: Filter volumes by mode (Global/Scene/Local), size, and spacing configuration to manage APV setups.
- Baking Sets: Analyze baking configuration including probe spacing, renderer thresholds, sky occlusion, and invalidity fixes.
- Materials: Find emissive materials and filter by emission intensity, emission modes.
- Lighting Settings: Configure the lightmapping backend used, resolution, sample counts.
These queries can be tweaked as needed for your needs, and saved as assets in your project for re-use.
Lightmaps Provider
The release of Lighting Search adds a new provider to the Search framework - the Lightmaps provider. It integrates lightmap data into the Search framework with tabulated presentation and automatic exposure control.
Features:
- Thumbnail previews in a sortable, filterable table
- Metadata: index, dimensions, format, compression
- Exposure slider (-16 to +16 EV) with auto-calculation
- Use “Open preview window” button/action to open the detailed Lightmap Preview Window for individual lightmap inspection
Query Assets
Queries can be saved as Search Query assets:
- User queries: Stored in user preferences
- Project queries: Stored as assets (version controllable)
24 Likes
Very interesting. Which version did it land on?
Unity Search is a powerful framework, and it’s great that it’s being used more extensively in other parts of the engine.
3 Likes
Woah that’s great, amazing job!
Yes, but is that in the first alpha, the last beta, somewhere in between, in the first supported version?
I would recommend using the latest beta version of 6.5. At the time of writing this, it is 6000.5.0b7. Or, if you prefer, you can try the latest alpha of 6.6 
1 Like
are there any improvements planned for the general purpose search?
For example:
- I cannot configure shift+shift as a shortcut to open it (that one is default in basically every single IDE)
- its quite laggy on input, try to type anything into the search and observe how the input field is behaving. it doesnt behave like a normal input field
Hi @Cell-i-Zenit ,
1- We haven’t change how the current unity shortcut manager behave. So if you tried it and it doesn’t support shift + shift then I am sorry 
I will admit I am surprise about this specific shortcut. I am used to Ctr l+ K (slack), Atl + shift + o (visual assist), Ctr l + T (Visual studio code and Resharper).
2- I dont know what is the last version of the Search Window you have used. We try to improve performance each version. Currently (6.3+): typing in the search field will issue a request for search, the search itself is async and shouldnt block the editor. Hopefully you will find this experience more satisfying.
Thanks for the feedback,
Seb
Iam on unity 6000.4 and its extremly laggy when typing anything in it. The search itself is quickly executed, but the whole ui freezing.
For example the search input field in the console is not blocking the ui thread at all. Here its fluidly behaving
EDIT: when i said that shift+shift is standard, i meant that every single IDE is supporting to setup this shortcut, but in unity you cannot do that. You cannot even set two step shortcuts for example like CTRL + K, CTRL + D
Maybe I can take this opportunity to bring up a pain point our team ran into last year: Multi-scene project where the lighting data depended on which scene is the active scene.
We had to be really conscious of when doing transitions, we’d unload the level scenes, which caused the master scene (that contains managers etc) to become the active scene. Lighting would then behave badly until we took the step to actively set a new level scene to be the active scene.
Can we please have more control over setting the lighting data without having to worry about what scene is the active scene? For that matter, the concept of an “active scene” needs to go away, period.
Edit: To bring this somewhat on topic 
… please be sure to test this tool in multi-scene projects where multiple scenes are loaded additively. It’d be helpful to have the tool call out what lighting data is actually being used.
2 Likes
Hi @BlackPete, the tool has been tested for multi-scene projects, I completely agree that this is an important use-case. However, if you run into any issues on this front, please let us know.
1 Like
Do y have async process (like Search indexing) running in backgroud? Can you check the U"nity ProgressWindow?
- Which queries were you using from the Lighting Search workflows?
- What was the size of your scene?
The whole table view mechanism should only bind “controls” over rows/cells that are visible in the search viewport. I am surprise that the ui is lagging.
Thanks,
Seb
its the general search and not the lightning search.
Scene is super small, with like 100 game objects. If i enter CTRL + F and just type anything it completely freezes. If i just mash the keyboard, it takes 10 seconds until it stops typing because it lags so much
Nothing is going on process wise in the background
I would be interested in testing this exact workflow:
- Which unity version are you using?
- Can you share your project with me?
- Can you post a small video of the search in action so I can maybe catch what is going on?
I would like to understand how scene search can be so slow.
