Create realistic lighting for moving objects in Unity

Unity can be used for baking light maps. Of course, not all objects in the scene are static and including many objects in light maps can make baking process much much longer. The solution for that comes with light probes.

Light probes

When you bake lighting Unity simulate light rays bouncing of your objects and encodes this information in a texture called "light map" that is applied to them. It means that Unity does not need to calculate lighting during gameplay or realtime walktrough.

Light probes also bake lighting, but they bake it for a particular places, where light probes are. First, you need to bake lighting for static objects, so you need to mark and your directional lighting as static. Your directional light should be in mixed mode, which enables it both for static and moving objects in the scene.

Then, you add light probes to your scene by creating light probes group. You can edit them and move them in different places of your scene. You can also add more probes.