Light Explorer extension

The Light Explorer extension allows you to create your own version of the Light Explorer window. This window is a powerful visualization and editing tool that you can use to see every Light in your Scene and edit their properties. With this extension, you can extend the current window in multiple ways. For example, you can:

• Change the tabs, from simply changing the tab name to adding your own custom tabs that display lists of different types of GameObject. This is useful if you want to display property information for your own custom Reflection Probes, for example.
• Change the columns on a tab, again from changing the name to adding your own custom columns. Adding columns is useful if you want to view extra Light properties.

Use this extension to create a Light Explorer within your own custom Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP), or with the High Definition Render Pipeline’s custom Lights.

Extending the Light Explorer

To extend the Light Explorer, you can either inherit from the:

• ILightingExplorerExtension interface and override the GetContentTabs method.
• DefaultLightingExplorerExtension class, which inherits from ILightingExplorerExtension. This class provides you with all of the content that is already in the window. Use this if you only want to override the number of tabs, the titles of each tab, or which Lights to display. To find out how you can extend the Light Explorer this way, see the example below.

Example code

The examples in this section show you how to extend the default Light Explorer class to only show the Name column for Lights, and change the number of tabs. In your own implementation, you can override as many or as few methods as you want.

The following example only shows the name column for Lights:

namespace UnityEditor
{
    [LightingExplorerExtensionAttribute(typeof(SomeRenderPipelineAsset))]
    public class SimpleExplorerExtension : DefaultLightingExplorerExtension
    {
        protected override LightingExplorerTableColumn[] GetLightColumns()
        {
            return new[]
            {
                new LightingExplorerTableColumn(LightingExplorerTableColumn.DataType.Name, Styles.Name, null, 200), // 0: Name
            }
        }
    }
}

The following example only shows the name and enabled status for Lights, and hides the Emissive Materials tab (only shows 3 tabs instead of 4)

namespace UnityEditor
{
    [LightingExplorerExtensionAttribute(typeof(SomeOtherRenderPipelineAsset))]
    public class ComplexLightExplorerExtension : DefaultLightingExplorerExtension
    {
       protected virtual UnityEngine.Object[] GetLights()
        {
            return Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll<Light>();
        }

        protected virtual LightingExplorerTableColumn[] GetLightColumns()
        {
            return new[]
            {
                new LightingExplorerTableColumn(LightingExplorerTableColumn.DataType.Name, Styles.Name, null, 200), // 0: Name
                new LightingExplorerTableColumn(LightingExplorerTableColumn.DataType.Checkbox, Styles.On, "m_Enabled", 25), // 1: Enabled
            {
        {

        public virtual LightingExplorerTab[] GetContentTabs()
        {
            return new[]
            {
                new LightingExplorerTab("Light Table", GetLights, GetLightColumns),
                new LightingExplorerTab("Reflection Probes", GetReflectionProbes, GetReflectionProbeColumns),
                new LightingExplorerTab("Light Probes", GetLightProbes, GetLightProbeColumns)            };
        }
    }
}

Useful classes and methods

Here is a list of classes and methods that you can use to extend the Light Explorer:

ILightingExplorerExtension:

public virtual LightingExplorerTab[] GetContentTabs();
public virtual void OnEnable() {}
public virtual void OnDisable() {}

DefaultLightingExplorerExtension (inherit from ILightingExplorerExtension):

public virtual LightingExplorerTab[] GetContentTabs();
public virtual void OnEnable() {}
public virtual void OnDisable() {}

protected virtual UnityEngine.Object[] GetLights();
protected virtual LightingExplorerTableColumn[] GetLightColumns();

protected virtual UnityEngine.Object[] GetReflectionProbes();
protected virtual LightingExplorerTableColumn[] GetReflectionProbeColumns();

protected virtual UnityEngine.Object[] GetLightProbes();
protected virtual LightingExplorerTableColumn[] GetLightProbeColumns();

protected virtual UnityEngine.Object[] GetEmissives();
protected virtual LightingExplorerTableColumn[] GetEmissivesColumns();

• 2019–08–13 Page published with editorial review
• Light Explorer extension added in 2018.3 NewIn20183