Forward rendering path in the Built-In Render Pipeline

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.

The Forward rendering path renders each GameObject in one or more render passes, depending on the lights that affect the object.

Lights themselves are also treated differently by the Forward rendering path, depending on their settings and intensity. For more information, refer to Per-pixel and per-vertex lights.

Render passes

For each GameObject, Unity first renders the Base Pass, which renders the following:

One per-pixel light that affects the GameObject.
All the per-vertex and spherical harmonics (SH) lights that affect the GameObject.
Lightmap data for the GameObject
Ambient lighting
Emissive lighting
Shadows from directional lights

Note: Lightmapped objects don’t receive lighting from SH lights.

Unity then renders one Additional Pass for each per-pixel light that affects the GameObject. Unity doesn’t render shadows for these lights.

Additional resources

Introduction to rendering paths in the Built-In Render Pipeline

Deferred rendering path in the Built-In Render Pipeline

Unity Manual

Forward rendering path in the Built-In Render Pipeline

Render passes

Additional resources