Important: The Built-In Render Pipeline is deprecated and will be made obsolete in a future release.
It remains supported, including bug fixes and maintenance, through the full Unity 6.7 LTS lifecycle.
For more information on migration, refer to Migrating from the Built-In Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline and Render pipeline feature comparison.
Find the LightMode tag values you can use to control which pass the Built-In Render PipelineA series of operations that take the contents of a Scene, and displays them on a screen. Unity lets you choose from pre-built render pipelines, or write your own. More info
See in Glossary executes.
If you do not set the LightMode tag in a Pass, the Built-In Render Pipeline uses the Always tag value for that Pass.
| Value | Function |
|---|---|
Always |
Always rendered; does not apply any lighting. This is the default value. |
ForwardBase |
Used in Forward renderingA rendering path that renders each object in one or more passes, depending on lights that affect the object. Lights themselves are also treated differently by Forward Rendering, depending on their settings and intensity. More info See in Glossary; applies ambient, main directional light, vertex/SH lights and lightmapsA 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. |
ForwardAdd |
Used in Forward rendering; applies additive per-pixel lights, one Pass per light. |
Deferred |
Used in Deferred ShadingA rendering path in the Built-in Render Pipeline that places no limit on the number of Lights that can affect a GameObject. All Lights are evaluated per-pixel, which means that they all interact correctly with normal maps and so on. Additionally, all Lights can have cookies and shadows. More info See in Glossary; renders G-buffer. |
ShadowCaster |
Renders object depth into the shadowmap or a depth texture. |
MotionVectors |
Used to calculate per-object motion vectors. |
Vertex |
Used in legacy Vertex Lit rendering when the object is not lightmapped; applies all vertex lights. |
VertexLMRGBM |
Used in legacy Vertex Lit rendering when the object is lightmapped, and on platforms where the lightmap is RGBM encoded (PC & console). |
VertexLM |
Used in legacy Vertex Lit rendering when the object is lightmapped, and on platforms where lightmap is double-LDR encoded (mobile platforms). |
Meta |
This Pass is not used during regular rendering, only for lightmap baking or EnlightenA lighting system by Geomerics used in Unity for Enlighten Realtime Global Illumination. More info See in Glossary Realtime Global IlluminationA group of techniques that model both direct and indirect lighting to provide realistic lighting results. See in Glossary. For more information, refer to Lightmapping and shaders. |