TGC69
patreon
Small Lighting Tutorial
🕑 Added 2021-12-02 15:09:29 +0000 UTCHi,
here is a short pretty basic "how to" adjust the lighting in my scenes and also most other scenes.
I am not a lighting pro myself and for sure don't know all the tricks there are, but nevertheless I learned some stuff from experimenting, which I want to share with you.
In PART 1 I describe what I use and how I make the lighting in general. Some of you might find it useful and also some of you might have tips for me what I can make better.
PART 2 will be a sum up how to increase or decrease lighting intensity in "Virtual Sweetheart ReLoaded". So skip to it if you just interested in this one.
PART 1
The tools/lights I use
Colorcorrect/Tonemap
- First of all I am a big fan of the colorcorrect/tonemap asset made by driver505. It makes the colors and lighting more vibrant, so I add it to basicaly everything. Here is a direct comparison with it on and off: https://imgur.com/uxk2F11
In the scene you can find it here attached to the CUA-Atom https://imgur.com/lYx6S3F
Two point lighting
- I also like to use two point lighting, so I only try to spawn 2 invisible light sources on all occasions. Most of the time when I tried to utilize 3 light sources, it killed the nice looking shadows (especially on hairs) and also makes volumetric effect look worse. Here is a video comparison: https://imgur.com/Sf6toGy
In the scene the 2 light sources can be found here (red squares) https://imgur.com/JePxSsg
They are attached to animation patterns (yellow squares and lines) to change position, so the dudes shadow does not block the view on the sexing parts.
Scene Lighting
- The last instance of lighting I use is the "Scene Lighting" menu. (This is how you can access it in VaM: https://imgur.com/WGdZJQM )
The "Global Illumination" options https://imgur.com/Rts5rAw affect how the skyboxes interact/illuminate all internal VaM objects. They don't do nothing to the Custom Unity Assets like the environment.
I don't do much to these options other then set "Master Intensity" somewhere between 0.00 and 0.10 and check how it looks like with different skyboxes https://imgur.com/cfkGluv
Usually I also leave the "Diffuse Intensity" at 1.00. In this scene I turned it completely down, because I liked the "SkyCyber1" skybox for the view outside the window, but did not like how it changes the skin to yellowish/greenish color like in this clip: https://imgur.com/7Nzqjpy
"Camera Exposure" slider regulates the lighting intensity of spawned "Invisible lights" to VaM objects. It does not affect the Custom Unity Assets (environment in this scene) aswell like you can see in this clip https://imgur.com/R7C5GCS
Usually I leave it at 1.00. In this scene I reduced it, because I wanted to increase the lighting intensity and range of spawned invisible lights to illuminate the Custom Unity Asset environment more. So I had to reduce the Camera Exposure to balance the illumination on the Girl and other VaM objects https://imgur.com/8U2PrPR
The last section of "Scene Lighting" menu is "Unity Ambient Lighting" https://imgur.com/YKuCbVr
This part is very usefull to increase the lighting intensity (and also change color) to Custom Unity Assets like environment, without doing anything to VaM objects. Here is a little video demonstration of it: https://imgur.com/mn8JGvz
I use this section pretty often to balance the overall lighting.
PART 2
The SumUp
So basically you will need to play with 2 "Invisible lights" over here https://imgur.com/JePxSsg (They are a little bit clunky to click on, because of animation pattern, so another way to access them is through "select" menu. They are called "LightFrontLeft" and "LightFrontRight" https://imgur.com/zOsO0Hh )
and Unity Ambient Lighting & Camera Exposure in Scene Lighting menu https://imgur.com/AWreoNH
To increase the illumination in the scene just increase the Intensity and/or Range of the Invisible Lights and reduce the camera exposure like in this clip: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/seashelldefiantafricanporcupine
To reduce the lighting and make the scene darker you will also need to play around with unity ambient lighting like in this clip: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/flimsyovercookedarcticwolf
After you found your fav lighting don't forget to save the scene!
This is it. I hope this tutorial helps at least some of you. Don't change too much though, cause I want to release meaty update with lots of new dynamic position changes in about a week at latest :)
Comments
TGC
Yo are welcome :D
Chris
This is extremely interesting. Thanks for sharing.
TGC
Well I kinda noticed aswell a bit that they are hungry. Don't know how much exactly, but it is still a good reason to try to avoid them, when its possible :)
CaseEP
Note: 1) Note that most of what I wrote above is conjecture. 2) Not sure it's fair to say that the Anipatterns really "eat" performance - what I DO know is that the Unity 2018 version VaM is based on has no native implementation of splines (or "Beziercurves", as they are often (misleadingly) called) and that Meshed implemented a rather spartanic, homegrown implementation of what looks to me like CadMull-Rom splines, which is (afaiks) the passed on to Unity's animationcurve class. Dunno how efficient Meshed's implementation is - Splines are a pretty basic tool, and you're pretty much guaranteed to be using the one or other variety of them as soon as you go beyond drawing straight lines.
TGC
If its already a bit performance saving thats great! Especially without downsides and even with advantages :) Also interesting to know that the animation patterns are such performance eaters and why. I am already trying to avoid them at all costs, but will try to do that even more in the future. Definitely helps me a lot to know such stuff :)
CaseEP
Yeah, I had a peek at the .cs file, and as far as I can tell, the plugin only stores position & orientation for the initial and final point. No other storables - that's six little floats as opposed to the mid-sized novel the anipattern will add to your scene .json. And it just uses Unity's built-in lerp & slerp for animation rather than involving the whole machinery of computing a cubic interpolation polynomial in realtime and passing that onto an animationcurve every update step. Won't save you a huge amount of performance if it's just the two patterns - but if it's a whole bunch of them, my guess the cost will add up rather quickly.
TGC
Thats pretty cool idea! Just tested it and it works perfect with blend to trigger the linear animation. Gonna sack animation pattern for this then. It also has an additional benefit of moving the lights freely around! Thanks for this one :D
CaseEP
Wrt Performance/Filesize: Moving the lighting sources with animationpatters is another three atoms each, and animpatterns have a lot of storables (ie additional entries in the scene .json) As long as you only need linear movements, I think you can save some performance by using the LinearAnimation logicbrick. Pretty sure it'll also help a bit with keeping the size of the scene .json down
TGC
Cool very happy to hear that :)
unknowngreatone
Thank you so much for this! I made edits and saved scenes, but didn't change global illum. That option really did it for me.
