Admittely, I’m not 100% certain on this, since LWRP throws an error message when I try to follow the google doc to install it, but I haven’t read that they come with any new lights…
Doesn’t Unity think rectangular Area lights, or pill shaped lights are important?
I know there’s a half-way there implementation currently rotting on Github from an old Adam demo, but that’s only a very limited deferred implementation.
The shadows from point lights were atrocious looking in Unity for many, many years, so I’m hoping at least those have been fixed… if I can only get this LWRP up and running…
LWRP doesn’t have any advanced lights. The lightweight pipeline is there to be performant and these new lights in realtime have a cost to render. One Area light without shadows is two times the cost of a regular spotlight in HDRP, if you want to try the new fancy lights you will have to use the HDRP.
The new light types and shapes are Spot
Cone - Regular/Default Shape
Pyramid - New
Box - New
Rectangle - Realtime Area Light Line - Realtime, similar to Rectangle/Area Light but just a line
In the lightweight Pipeline, you still have Area Lights but you have to bake them just like the Default Render Pipeline
Currently, only One realtime Light can be enabled in a scene so you will mostly be using baked lighting. There was a mention of multiple shadow casting lights from a Unity Dev on the SRP team. Take a look at the post and thread for more details
However, I disagree on the performance, because one area light without shadows can easily cover the volume that you’d otherwise need three of four spotlights to cover (which is my issue right now, since I can only use 8 lights per scene in LWRP and having an area light would have been soo much easier).
Wait, am I reading you right that you are saying that a Spotlight has a box mode now? I’m on the 2018.2 beta, how do I activate this? I don’t see the option? Is this HDRP only as well?
(And what would be the difference between a box shaped spotlight and an area light?)
Yea just set up a regular Area Light and bake it. Only Baked lighting in LWRP and Default Pipeline for Area Lights, Realtime is only HDRP
Yes, these new Lights/Light Types are only in HDRP (well some being able to be realtime is HDRP only since you can still use Area Light in LWRP and Default Pipeline)
For LWRP you can only have one real-time light
So every other light in the scene will need to be baked, you have to keep this in mind using LWRP.
Using point lights you will need to bake them to get shadows since it doesn’t support real-time shadows
This chart will help you to understand how the LWRP compares to the Default Render pipeline. (Also, it sounds to me that you should be using the HDRP instead of LWRP for what you want to do.)
At the bottom of the post on this page, you will see a chart comparing the two pipelines
