Emissive materials

Like area lights, emissive materials emit light across their surface area. They contribute to bounced light in your sceneA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary and associated properties such as color and intensity can be changed during gameplay. Whilst area lights are not supported by Realtime Global IlluminationA group of techniques that model both direct and indirect lighting to provide realistic lighting results. Unity has two global illumination systems that combine direct and indirect lighting.: Baked Global Illumination, and Realtime Global Illumination (deprecated).
See in Glossary, similar soft lighting effects in realtime are still possible using emissive materials.

‘Emission’ is a property of the Standard ShaderA small script that contains the mathematical calculations and algorithms for calculating the Color of each pixel rendered, based on the lighting input and the Material configuration. More info
See in Glossary which allows static objects in our scene to emit light. By default the value of ‘Emission’ is set to zero. This means no light will be emitted by objects assigned materials using the Standard ShaderA built-in shader for rendering real-world objects such as stone, wood, glass, plastic and metal. Supports a wide range of shader types and combinations. More info
See in Glossary.

There is no range value for emissive materials but light emitted will again falloff at a quadratic rate. Emission will only be received by objects marked as ‘Static’ or “LightmapA pre-rendered texture that contains the effects of light sources on static objects in the scene. Lightmaps are overlaid on top of scene geometry to create the effect of lighting. More info
See in Glossary Static’ from the InspectorA Unity window that displays information about the currently selected GameObject, asset or project settings, allowing you to inspect and edit the values. More info
See in Glossary. Similarly, emissive materials applied to non-static, or dynamic geometry such as characters will not contribute to scene lighting.

However, materials with an emission above zero will still appear to glow brightly on-screen even if they are not contributing to scene lighting. This effect can also be produced by selecting ‘None’ from the Standard Shader’s ‘Global Illumination’ Inspector property. Self-illuminating materials like these are a useful way to create effects such as neons or other visible light sources.

Emissive materials only directly affect static geometry in your scene. If you need dynamic, or non-static geometry - such as characters, to pick up light from emissive materials, Light ProbesLight probes store information about how light passes through space in your scene. A collection of light probes arranged within a given space can improve lighting on moving objects and static LOD scenery within that space. More info
See in Glossary must be used.