Lighting and effects
Updated: Feb 13, 2025
Visual Effects (VFX) and lighting, along with other
art assets, enhance the engagement and immersion of your app’s virtual environments. These elements, guided by your
art direction, help you create experiences that captivate and retain the user’s attention, whether you’re aiming for a realistic or stylized look. For example, good lighting and effects can help your app’s:
- Mood setting: Bright sunlight creates a happier and safer atmosphere while darker tones or glowing lights add mystery and excitement.
- Guiding attention: Lighting can highlight important elements, like a glowing door you need to open or an object to pick up. Effects such as sparkles or glowing outlines make the elements noticeable.
- Immersion: Effects like fog, sparkles, or explosions add excitement and immersion, enhancing the feeling of being in the game or app. The way light interacts with objects, such as by creating shadows or reflections, can make them appear more 3D.
- Visual Appeal: Lighting and effects enhance the visual appeal, helps create a more cohesive style, and increases believability in your virtual environment.
Lighting is crucial in creating believable and immersive environments. It simulates real-world lighting in a virtual space based on the digital object’s surface orientation, or normal. Normals are vectors that define each face’s orientation on a 3D model. Typically, normals attach to a mesh’s vertices, as each vertex can belong to multiple faces. This setup allows for smooth interpolation of normal values across the model’s surface. Normals determine how light interacts with the model, influencing its appearance and shading. They are essential for realistic lighting effects and defining the model’s shape and structure.
The types of lights you can use are engine specific. Below is a list of some of the most common light objects.
Directional | A directional light emits parallel light rays in a specific direction, often simulating sunlight or other strong light sources. |
Ambient | Ambient light provides overall illumination throughout an environment, creating a sense of atmosphere. |
Emissive | Emissive materials emit their own light, often used for glowing effects or simulating neon signs. |
Point | A point light emits light in all directions from a single point, often simulating light bulbs or other small sources. |
Spot | A spot light emits light within a focused cone, often simulating flashlights or other focused sources. |
Area | An area light emits light over a larger area, often simulating softbox lights or other diffuse sources. |
For more engine specific information on lighting, see Unity’s Lighting documentation or Unreal’s Lighting documentation.
Effects are visual enhancements that add depth and atmosphere to an application and help draw the user into the virtual world. For example, adding fog can create a mysterious atmosphere, while sparkles can make a scene feel magical.
The total variety of effects you can use are engine specific. Below is a list of some of the most common effect objects.
Particle systems | Particle systems are used in conjunction with textures to create effects like fire, smoke, and explosions. |
Shaders | Shaders are used to create effects like glow, bloom, and lens flares. |
Animation | Animation is used to create effects like movement, rotation, and scaling. |
Physics | Physics is used to create effects like collision, gravity, and friction. |
Several software tools exist that can be used to create effects. Some popular tools are:
Unity | A popular game engine for creating 2D and 3D games and applications. |
Unreal Engine | A powerful game engine for developing high-quality games and applications. |
Adobe After Effects | Software for digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing to create visual effects. |
Blender | Free and open-source software for creating 3D models, animations, and visual effects. |
Maya | A 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software that can be used to create complex effects. |
Nuke | A digital compositing software that allows developers to create and manage complex visual effects. |
Houdini | A 3D animation software that specializes in procedural modeling, rigging, and dynamics, making it ideal for creating realistic effects. |
Cinema 4D | A 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software that is popular among motion graphics artists and designers. |
Most lighting tools you will use for your app are built into the engine of choice. Whether you’re using Unity or Unreal Engine, it’s essential to understand how to use your engine’s lighting tools. Here are some things to consider when setting up your apps lighting:
- Light baking: Light baking involves precomputing the lighting information for a scene and storing it in a texture map. This can greatly improve performance, especially in scenes with complex lighting.
- Light probes: Light probes are used to capture the lighting information at specific points in a scene. They can be used to create more accurate and detailed lighting effects.
- Post-processing effects: Post-processing effects, such as bloom, lens flares, and depth of field, can add an extra layer of realism to your lighting.
- Ambient Occlusion: Ambient occlusion is a technique used to simulate the way ambient light interacts with objects in a scene. It can add depth and realism to your lighting.
Once you’ve added your lights, explore their properties to achieve the desired effect. This includes:
- Intensity: Adjusting the intensity of the light to control its brightness.
- Color: Changing the color of the light to match the mood or atmosphere of your scene.
- Range: Adjusting the range of the light to control its distance and falloff.
Best practices for lighting and effects
When creating effects lighting for the Meta Quest headset and other supported devices, there are several specific considerations to keep in mind:
- Test on intended devices and for user comfort: Test your apps in the desired headset or hardware. Refine as needed to prevent slowdowns or motion sickness. Be creative and use various techniques and tools to achieve the desired visual outcome. Adjust areas where effects may not work as intended. Avoid overwhelming users with too many effects, which can cause discomfort. Realistic lighting can make objects hard to see.
- Visibility: Adjust areas where lighting is too bright or too dark. Avoid harsh transitions. Sudden changes in brightness or flashy effects can cause discomfort or motion sickness. Gradual transitions are key.
- Performance: Headsets have limited processing power. Optimize lighting for performance by:
- Using real-time lights sparingly as they are resource-intensive. Bake lighting whenever possible.
- Simplify effects to avoid overburdening hardware. Complex effects can cause lag, which is especially noticeable in immersive experiences.
- Respect frame rates by ensuring effects and lighting maintain a frame rate of at least 60 FPS (90 FPS is ideal for VR).
- Latency: Headsets can have high latency. Use effects like motion blur and temporal anti-aliasing to reduce latency appearance.
- AR app lighting: Use adaptable lighting for AR apps, which mix digital and real-world elements. Ensure lighting matches the user’s physical environment.
- Highlight interactable objects: Use light or effects to draw attention to key areas, like a glowing outline on objects players can grab.
- MR benefits from environmental mapping: Use effects like reflections and global illumination to integrate virtual and real-world elements seamlessly.
- Use shaders wisely: Shaders are small programs that run on the GPU. They can create amazing effects like glowing objects or realistic water but need optimization to avoid slowing down your app. When writing shaders, minimize calculations and texture samples. Many engines provide shader graphs, allowing you to create complex shaders without writing code, which helps maintain performance.
By using these tools and techniques, you can create stunning effects that enhance the overall experience and keep your users captivated and engaged in your app.
Content and performance review
For more information on content guidelines, performance requirements, and store policy concerning art assets see:
