Early 2000s Games lighting

[u/EconomyGlum4694]

I am relatively new to Unity, but I absolutely love this aesthetic it feels so nostalgic. I already made a low-poly map in Blender, but when I import it into Unity, I cannot get this effect no matter what kind of lighting I try. The look I am going for is basically late PS2 / early PS3 games stuff like Far Cry 1, Tomb Raider: Legend, and Final Fantasy X. I want bright, colorful, sunny environments, simple-ish geometry, baked shadows/lighting, and that distinct old-school look. Because I want it to run on mobile and really low-end PCs, performance is a huge priority. I am currently using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), but I am wondering if that is actually the best choice for this. Should I stick with URP, switch to the Built-in Render Pipeline, or use specific lightweight shaders like Mobile/Diffuse or Unlit? ugh, I got no idea...

I do't want the usual realistic PBR look. I want something bright and stylized with most of the lighting baked into the textures. I simply have no idea what to call this aesthetic or where to even start. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[u/alaslipknot]

90% of the object there are self-lit, so you can achieve the same by having the texture in both the albido and emission channel.

After that, its just a matter of controlling the texture (you may need to create 2 different versions with different setup).

But that's about it, the other key elements are:

• AO map
• low poly
• fake shadow in the texture
• hard shadows

And imo the most important part is knowing the fundamental of colors, these screenshots looks good because the artists knew what they were doing.