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.
Ambient occlusionA method to approximate how much ambient light (light not coming from a specific direction) can hit a point on a surface.
See in Glossary (AO) is a feature that simulates the soft shadows that occur in creases, holes, and surfaces that are close to each another. These areas occlude (block out) ambient light, so they appear darker.
It works by approximating how much ambient light can hit a point on a surface. It then darkens creases, holes and surfaces that are close to each other.
You can use ambient occlusion to add realism to your lighting.
If Baked Global Illumination is enabled in your Scene, Unity can bake ambient occlusion into the lightmaps. This is known as Baked Ambient Occlusion.
To enable baked ambient occlusion in your Scene:
If Global Illumination is not enabled in your Scene but you still want the effect of ambient occlusion, you can use a post-processing effect to apply real-time ambient occlusion to your Scene.
If Enlighten Realtime Global Illumination is enabled in your scene, the resolution for indirect lighting does not capture fine details or dynamic objects. We recommend using a real-time ambient occlusion post-processing effect, which has much more detail and results in higher quality lighting.
For information on real-time ambient occlusion post-processing effects, see post-processing effects.