In the Built-in Render Pipeline, when using a Surface Shader, how lighting is applied and which Passes of the shader are used depends on which rendering path is used. Each pass in a shader communicates its lighting type via Pass Tags.
ForwardBase
and ForwardAdd
passes are used.Deferred
pass is used.PrepassBase
and PrepassFinal
passes are used.Vertex
, VertexLMRGBM
and VertexLM
passes are used.ShadowCaster
pass is used.ForwardBase
pass renders ambient, lightmaps, main directional light and not important (vertex/SH) lights at once. ForwardAdd
pass is used for any additive per-pixel lights; one invocation per object illuminated by such light is done. See Forward Rendering for details.
If forward rendering is used, but a shader does not have forward-suitable passes (i.e. neither ForwardBase
nor ForwardAdd
pass types are present), then that object is rendered just like it would in Vertex Lit path, see below.
Deferred
pass renders all information needed for lighting (in built-in shaders: diffuse color, specular color, smoothness,
world space normal, emission). It also adds lightmaps, reflection probes and ambient lighting into the emission channel. See Deferred Shading for details.
PrepassBase
pass renders normals & specular exponent; PrepassFinal
pass renders final color by combining textures, lighting & emissive material properties. All regular in-scene lighting is done separately in screen-space. See Deferred Lighting for details.
Since vertex lighting is most often used on platforms that do not support programmable shaders, Unity can’t create multiple shader variants internally to handle lightmapped vs. non-lightmapped cases. So to handle lightmapped and non-lightmapped objects, multiple passes have to be written explicitly.
Vertex
pass is used for non-lightmapped objects. All lights are rendered at once, using a fixed function OpenGL/Direct3D lighting model (Blinn-Phong)VertexLMRGBM
pass is used for lightmapped objects, when lightmaps are RGBM encoded (PC and consoles). No realtime lighting is applied; pass is expected to combine textures with a lightmap.VertexLM
pass is used for lightmapped objects, when lightmaps are double-LDR encoded (mobile platforms). No realtime lighting is applied; pass is expected to combine textures with a lightmap.