Allright, time for half two of my lighting adventures. As my so-called workflow consists primarily of trials and errors, explaining it’s fairly onerous. But I’ll attempt to give a shallow clarification.

As I implied in a earlier put up, I discovered stadiums to be a very good candidate for baked lighting since they’re just about the one static components within the sport. Stadiums are available three sizes, and every one in every of them should have two variations: one with lights on (used throughout ship choice and outcomes screens) and one solely lit by the solar (used throughout the battle). Below are some photographs of the present fashions, lights on and off.

Before the precise lighting, I used to be compelled to do some critical refactoring. My lights and light-weight settings have been all over, and a few directional lights have been already on baked mode; I do not know how they have been even working. So for starters, I corrected the sunshine varieties, removed some out of date gentle sources and renamed all objects appropriately so as to make the most of Unity’s gentle explorer.

The stadium fashions took some refining additionally. I attempt to follow the WW1-style, and 1910s stadiums have been tough locations. But nonetheless, to satisfy even essentially the most rudimentary security requirements, I used to be compelled so as to add handrails in addition to inexperienced lights to indicate the exit. And after all I had so as to add the lights themselves to the ceiling and contained in the packing containers.

As far as I do know (and proper me if I’m improper), Unity can solely bake one set of sunshine maps per scene. This compelled me to desert the sooner stadium prefabs and begin utilizing a multi-scene workflow. It’s a very good time for training: if there have been others working with the undertaking, the multi-scene method could be virtually obligatory. I created six new scenes: gentle and darkish variations for every three arenas. These can now be loaded additively when the background enviornment is required in different scenes.

Adjusting shadow map resolutions was fairly time consuming at begin, however I managed to determine a simple workflow. I begin by ramping up the lightmap decision in lighting settings till essentially the most seen and essential geometry is correct sufficient. Then I cut back the “scale in lightmap” -values (discovered within the MeshRenderer part) of the opposite fashions as little as potential inside the required accuracy. With filtering on, the resolutions might be saved surprisingly low, which reduces the baking time. Below is the picture of the sunshine maps I’m presently utilizing.

Another tough process was to arrange the sunshine probes for the dynamic objects (there will probably be spectators in some unspecified time in the future, in any case). Unity’s personal instruments are fairly unhealthy particularly for putting the probes in round kinds. I ended up making a helper editor script and inserting probes procedurally. End outcome works surprisingly nicely. Image under reveals the probe positions.

And right here’s how they lit the placeholder spectators in gentle and darkish arenas.

I’m already fairly happy with the small enviornment, which was the primary one I did; I nonetheless must do the identical issues for medium and enormous stadiums. Luckily, most components of the bigger stadiums are simply scaled (or pulled/pushed in Blender) variations of the small one, in order that they share the identical textures and UV-mappings. This signifies that all arenas use the identical supplies, and there shouldn’t be a lot work left after the small stadium is perfected.

The actual problem is to animate the gang. Regular skinned animation is method too sluggish for hundreds of meshes, so every kind of GPU trickery will probably be wanted. More about it later.