What are lightmaps in Unity?

Lightmaps in Unity are essential for creating realistic lighting effects in 3D environments. They are pre-calculated textures that store lighting information for static objects in a scene. This means that lightmaps capture the effects of light, shadows, and ambient occlusion that occur in a particular area, allowing designers to enhance the visual quality of their projects without the high computational cost of real-time lighting.

By baking these textures into the scene, Unity enables more efficient rendering since static objects do not require continuous calculations for lighting at runtime. As a result, lightmaps significantly improve performance while maintaining visual detail, especially in complex scenes with many light sources. This approach is especially useful for static environments that don’t change often, as it can represent intricate lighting scenarios that would otherwise be difficult to manage in real-time.

In contrast, other options describe different functionalities that do not pertain to lightmaps. For instance, textures controlling object movement refers to a different concept entirely, and real-time rendering effects deal with dynamic lighting techniques rather than pre-calculated data. Similarly, audio settings saved as textures does not relate to visual effects at all.