Best Practices: Lighting & Graphic Fidelity in Unity 5

I understand that at the end of the day the look of the game comes down to your art direction and various other technical aspects, but I was wondering if anyone here might share what tools/plugins/extensions/techniques they use to improve Unity's overall lighting and graphical fidelity? Currently, I feel like I've hit a ceiling in what I can accomplish in Unity 5's lighting and Standard Surface shaders, and I was hoping maybe others would have suggestions for what they used to get the best possible results.

 

Check this out, might give you some ideas.

 

Truthfully, I'm not impressed with that person. He has no technical abilities, which is okay, but he flaunts the fact that he's ignorant of most of Unity capabilities and is clearly proud of it. He says multiple times "these effects are expensive, but I dont care". I feel as though that video is almost an anti-Unity talk, as his clear "non-knowledge" of everything makes it seem like people who use Unity don't know how to do anything, which in reality is not the case.

 

Any other suggestions?

 

He may not be an expert, but he has thrown together a very impressive demo.

His post FX stack is expensive, but he has the right idea. Unity "Graphical Fidelity" comes down to how you use the tools at your disposal. There are many very good post effects on the asset store, and the most skillful among us can write our own.

I have a feeling though that despite being dismissive of Lestyn Lloyd's work, you are not looking to invent your own techniques here. You want to do just what he did, and find assets and techniques that others have made to improve your project.

Nothing wrong with that! It is how games get developed quickly and on small budgets! Best of luck with your searches.

 

If anyone's interested in improving their understanding of Unity 5, I'd recommend this free Udemy course. It helped me out immensely. Besides that though, I'll have to look into custom shaders I guess.

Regarding his demos, all of them are screenshots, except for the last one and that's a static scene. I'm not sure any of his scenes would really run that well in real-time in a simulation or game. I try to stay away from image effects if possible. But yeah, I was hoping to not have to re-write the wheel when needed. I'll have to try out some plugins I suppose.