Week 5 - Lighting

This week was all about experimeting with the lighting engine in Unity. Thus far, the lighting in the scenes I have been posting was just Unity's basic lighting calculations, with the only light in the level being from the skybox (and the sun). To get a feel for more advanced lighting techniques, I watched a tutorial by Brackeys on YouTube. This tutorial covered emmisive materials and lightmap baking to get an understanding for how the lighting engine works on static (non-moving) objects. Here's a screenshot of my own mockup of the tutorial scene (with some extra post processing effects (bloom, vignette) to make it look nicer):

Following on from this, I went back and revisited my Tasmanian tourist scene to add some nicer lighting using the techniques I learned earlier. This involved adding in some extra lights to the scene, adjusting the already implemented skybox and directional light, as well as setting (most) objects to static and baking the lightmaps. The reason I say most is because there is one non-static object I added into the scene that I wanted to use realtime lighting - that being a simple player object that can walk around the environment. The end result of all of this was a warmer afternoon-like scene with plenty of streetlights that provide different shadow angles around the environment. This is especially noticable on the player-model as you walk around. Below is a side-by-side comparison showing before and after the lighting tweaks.

Also, here's a screenshot showing the different shadow angles caused by the multiple light sources in the scene. The major shadow (projected onto the statue in this scene) is caused by the sun (directional light), while the secondary shadow on the ground is caused by the lamp post (point light).

Lighting is very important when it comes to level design, so I'm looking forward to using the skills I've learned this week in my future projects to make them look even nicer. 'Till next time!