Lighting Tips

I'm starting this thread hoping to share (and get) tips on lighting.

Many beginners just dump a directional light in the scene, set it to cast shadows, and adjust the ambient light. But the shadowed areas end up looking pretty drab and uniformly lit. But we can make this a lot better. First. go into your scene and find your directional light, and clone it. Then, set the "shadow type" of the clone to "no shadows", and set the intensity to 0.1. Go to your original light, and subtract 0.1 from the intensity. Everything that is in a shadow now has just a little more depth, and the drawcalls are hardly effected at all.


If you have any lighting tips, please share!

 

You can probably use a few really soft point lights instead and keep it to baked only, which should mean no draw call increase at all. You can fake GI a lot with unity free and a bit of effort

But for unity pro, beast has a number of tricks that will make it look fantastic without these tips such as AO and bounces.

 

That's actually really cool! I'll try that!
I don't have any lighting tips on me at the amount, but I'm looking forward to seeing what others come up with!

 

Retoast

 

Well, it only increased the draw calls by 2, so I don't feel so bad. But I always use realtime shadows, so this makes the scene look much better - and it effects the whole scene, and especially helps out the tree trunks (etc) that are always in shadow.

 

Thanks Jaimi and hippo realy usefull tips, i dont have any to share myself

 

You are helpful just sharing your own wonderful rainbow self, and keeping us prunes from attacking innocents.

 

0_o

 

Why thank you

 

Ok guys here is my tip. I have been playing a bit with the lighting using the deferred lighting rendering path and dual lightmaps. I played around with a technique to make it go from day to night with the same lightmaps by changing the directional light color and using fog. This is just an experiment so there could be issues with this I have not hit yet and any of you pros please point out if this is the right way to do it or not. Maybe there is a better approach - I am still learning. So here goes:

I have a daytime screenshot (this is on picasa so i can't put a direct link in, sorry). It is as I mentioned before, setup in deferred lighting with dual lightmaps. I have a blog entry on this and bump mapping terrain if you are interested.

Here is the night screenshot that shows the result of what I am going to describe next. So the way I did this was to do two things.

1) Change your fog, or maybe set your fog (in rendering settings) to Exp2, change the color to something that is nearly black. I did black with a hint of blue in it (for moonlight) - 0,0,35,255. Now adjust the density to your liking, i ended up with 0.0175. Now if you want it semi dark you can adjust both the color and density to get it right.

2) Change the color of your directional light source to be something that is the same as the fog, basically black with a hint of blue. I went with something a little brighter to give some more moonlight effect - 0,0,70,255. This can also be adjusted up to make it lighter.

Anyway that is it. You could probably make it dusk or maybe a blood moon with red, whatever. You are dealing with your ambient light and the light baked into your maps, so it may only work if this was generally white to begin with. Also you have your shadow distance in the equation. Mine is setup rather far so depending on that it may not work well either.

I made a third screenshot with fire to test out some point sources and see how it would look. Also it shows the issue with particle effects and SSAO. in the fire in front of the rocks. If you didn't know about that it is something to be aware of for any particle effects (possibly only semi-transparent ones, I don't remember).

I would think you could easily setup this effect using scripting and possibly interpolating values to give you a day to night transition. You won't have the sun moving because your lightmaps are prebaked, but it could work to simulate an afternoon to evening effect maybe. Also there is no cost to doing this because you are just changing colors - the fog will be a cost if you are not already using it though.

Sorry guys I forgot to mention this is obviously all pro stuff, i don't know how this would work in forward with a single lightmap. I guess it would be like the far lightmap in my scenario. But you are blocking/blending this out with fog while the near lightmap has the light integrated into the rendering. You may have to really use a lot of fog and ruin the effect in the forward rendering path with one lightmap.

 

i like to create a second light, set it near-orthogonal to the primary light and set it to some unnatural color like purple or red, with low intensity. No shadows, ofcourse.

 

Hippo, do you mean placing and baking point lights in a dome? ... I remember doing this in strata3d after playing myst...

 

Pretty much. We used a 16 light dome when baking the faked GI for our game City Living



Not the best shot to show it (best I could find to hand), but if you look at the shadowing between the buildings you can see more variation in the depth and less 'flatness'. The side of the building at the far right of the shot is a good example of this, as it's 90 degrees away from the main light of the scene, but still has variation around the 'Y' sign.

This is a fairly subtle example, and I think we could have got away with more GI, but we aired on the cautious side for a) the style we wanted and b) the fact the lightmap had to work for our full day night cycle.

Trickiest part of this is getting the balance right as it's very easy to cause over-bright with this kind of rig, but has no increased performance costs like some of the other techniques.

 

Another good trick is using layers to get your lighting how you want. If you have an ambient light you want adding some colour fill in your scene, but you also have some objects that maybe you don't want to have as much intense colour on, or maybe should be contrasted for other reasons, create a layer, and have your direction lights filter for those specific layers. I do this with lights, fog, and different game objects to help make some things pop out, and other things blend better into the environment.

 

When I followed a link from another thread to here, I thought this is where this thread was, and was confused to find it in gossip

 

Why would I look for non-specific tips in the Works In Progress area?

 

Sure - move it wherever you want. But maybe a section for general world design would be great too.

 

Maybe we could use a section for 'Design' related questions, as most of the non specific stuff generally fits into that category. The WIP section might work well for that too, but to me then the name doesn't really fit. I can certainly see what your trying to achieve though

 

Hmm why not creating a "lighting Challenge"? Without price of course, just do some lighting setup on some provided scene and post your result and light setup in this thread. You know kinda free for all community challenge while learning and sharing tips and trick about lighting a scene.

 

sounds fun.

 

If this does become a challenge, an explanation of how and WHY decisions were made would be very important. Getting a nice scene is nice. Getting an explanation like "If you add multiple directional lights, with their light settings like this, it simulates GI" or "Have one light set at this color, and another at this, BECAUSE..."

 

That's correct. Arrange the lights in a sort of hemispherical shape - it doesn't need to be exact, but it diffuses the shadows pretty well except for the really hard to get to cracks, giving that sort of gi look.

 

So...we gonna do the challenge or not?

 

what game is this:

 

http://amuletofshadows.blogspot.com/
Amulet of Shadows, by Michael Schenck. He's already contributed to some discussions on lighting.
Got some nice environments eh?

He's got a post on the first page of this thread.


He's also slacking on his blog!

 

Here i am looking for more lighting tips or maybe comments on the one I posted and I find people jabbing me to produce more! I am drowning in a goal driven behavior framework so maybe i will do a blog post on that. Of course if 3.4 would work on my laptop I could maybe get more accomplished. This is supposed to be a relaxing hobby...

@larvantholos I like the tip you mentioned, do you have an example screenshot that illustrates the kind of effect you get - was just wondering not asking you to do extra work to make one

 

I really liked how you created that nighttime look. I incorporated your advice into my scene and it made it look a lot better, thanks!

 

Does anyone know how to produce this? Not too worried about the mesh, more about which shader to use, lights, lightmapping, etc

 

Just a directional light really bright

 

Thank god someone finally answered that guys question. Man, has he been waiting a long time!

 

Woodland of crimere

 

or else just put in an area light. and thx no problem

 

Another tip, if using directional lights, in the lightning section, choose skybox to none, then use ambient illumination with a solid color, it gives much better results than skybox.