Environment and post-processing

Two groups of settings belong to the whole scene, not to an entity. Open the scene, and in the inspector choose the Scene tab: Environment is the light around everything, and Post Processing the finishing passes over the picture.

Environment

Sky

Sky Mode is one of:

Procedural (the default): a gradient from Sky Ground below the horizon, through Sky Horizon, to Sky Zenith overhead.
Analytic: a physically based daylight sky, coloured by the sun’s direction. Turbidity (2 to 10) is how hazy the air is.
Color: one flat colour, Sky Zenith / Color.
HDREquirect and Cubemap: an image. See Skies.

Sky Intensity brightens the sky and the light it gives; Sky Background Intensity dims only the sky you see, not its light. Sun Intensity and Sun Angular Size (in degrees) are the sun’s disc in the sky.

Ambient light

Surfaces are lit by the sky as well as by lights. IBL Diffuse Intensity and IBL Specular Intensity scale that light (IBL is image-based lighting: lighting from the sky’s picture), the first on surfaces’ colour and the second on their reflections. Ambient Color and Ambient Intensity add a flat light everywhere on top, to lift dark corners; 0 leaves the sky’s light alone.

Shadows

Shadow Distance, Shadow Cascade Split and Shadow Fade Distance set how far the sun’s shadows reach. See Lights and shadows.

Post Processing

Exposure and tone

Exposure (EV): brightens or darkens the whole picture, in photographic stops: +1 is twice as bright.
Auto Exposure: adjusts the exposure to the scene, as an eye does walking from a cave into daylight, at Adaptation Speed, between Auto Exposure Min (EV) and Auto Exposure Max (EV). Auto Exposure Key is how bright it aims for.
Tonemap: how brightness beyond white is fitted onto the screen. AgX (the default) rolls bright colours off gently; Clamp cuts them at white.

Bloom

Bloom (on) makes bright things glow into their surroundings. Bloom Threshold is how bright a point must be to glow (1 is white, so only emissive surfaces and highlights do), Bloom Knee softens the start, and Bloom Intensity is how strong the glow is.

Colour grading

Grading LUT is a lookup texture that recolours the picture, for a warm evening or a cold night: a strip of 16 squares, 256 by 16 pixels, imported with its colour space set to linear. Grading Intensity blends it in.

Ambient occlusion, reflections, GI

Ambient Occlusion: darkens creases, corners and the ground under things. GTAO or SSAO; Off at first. Ao Strength, Ao Radius and Ao Intensity tune it.
Screen-Space Reflections: reflections of what is on screen, in shiny surfaces.
Screen-Space GI: light bounced from what is on screen onto what is near it.

Each costs time. They work on what the camera sees, so what is off screen does not show in them.

Anti-aliasing

Anti-Aliasing smooths jagged edges:

Off (the default).
FXAA: cheap, softens the whole picture a little.
TAA: smoother and steadier, blending frames together; Taa Blend Factor sets how much. Fast motion can leave faint trails.

MSAA, in Project > Project Settings… on the Display tab, is another way, set for the whole game: 1 (off), 2 or 4 samples.

Reflection probes

Shiny surfaces reflect the sky. Indoors, that looks wrong: a polished floor in a cellar should reflect the cellar. A Reflection Probe captures the scene around it into a picture that the surfaces inside its box reflect.

Half Extents: the box, half its size along each axis. Fit it to the room.
Parallax (on): reflections line up with the box’s walls, as in a room, instead of seeming infinitely far away.
Blend Distance: how softly it fades out at the box’s edges.
Intensity, and Priority, which wins where boxes overlap.
Update: Static captures once (and again if the probe moves); Realtime captures again and again, for a room whose look changes; Manual captures only when a script asks, with ReflectionProbeComponent.of(entity):capture() (ReflectionProbeComponent::of(entity).capture() in AngelScript), for a room that changes now and then: lights switched on, a door opened. A Static probe can be asked too.

Up to 16 probes are used at once.

Levels that should look alike can share their settings. Under either group, Make Profile saves the scene’s values as a profile asset and switches the scene to it. Other scenes then set Source to Profile and choose it, and a change to the profile changes them all. Open Profile opens it, with a preview, and Copy Into Scene copies its values back into the scene, to change them there alone.

Make profiles directly with Create > Rendering > Environment Profile or Post Process Profile.