I’m a huge noob to all of this but I have a basic scene built up and so I started messing with the lighting but it felt like nothing changed when I was messing with the settings. I went to rebuilt lightning and boom my changes take affect but I was wondering if there is a way i can view these changes in real time without needing to rebuild the lighting every time. Thanks!
You can go to World Settings and check Force No-Precomputed Lighting and build lighting to get rid of all the baked lighting that can mess with previewing changes, and then uncheck Force No-Precomputed Lighting. It will only give you a rought preview of what the final baked lighting will look like, but at least there won’t be baked lighting getting in the way. You can also try to set up more dynamic lighting in the scene if you don’t want to bake lighting.
Before you build the lighting it only gives you a preview using dynamic shadows that won’t be as good of quality as you will get after building the lighting. If you want the nice looking lighting, then building the lighting is the only way to do that and it can’t give you instant results because it takes time to make the calculations and bake the lighting to lightmaps. If you need something dynamic, you can do like ZacD suggested to move to a completely dynamic system, but you won’t get as good of quality lighting.
The main difference between dynamic and static lighting is that dynamic lighting doesn’t bounce, so with static lighting it will calculate the light bounces and you get realistic lighting, it just takes a lot of time to do which is why it’ snot dynamic.