Which Lighting Mode in Unity provides realtime direct lighting while baking indirect lighting into lightmaps?

The Mixed lighting mode in Unity is specifically designed to offer a combination of real-time direct lighting and baked indirect lighting. This means that while direct light from light sources such as directional lights or point lights can illuminate objects dynamically in real-time, the more complex indirect lighting—how light bounces off surfaces and interacts with one another—is pre-calculated and stored in lightmaps.

This approach allows for more efficient rendering, as the real-time component can manage dynamic and interactive elements in the scene while the baked lightmaps handle the static lighting. This hybrid approach is particularly suitable for optimizing performance in scenarios where real-time lighting needs to coexist with high-quality lighting effects, making it a popular choice among developers for achieving a balance between visual fidelity and performance efficiency.

In contrast, the other lighting modes do not offer this specific blend of features. Realtime lighting does not bake any information; baked lighting solely relies on pre-computed lightmaps and does not handle dynamic lighting, while shadowed is not a recognized distinct lighting mode in this context.