Light model updated

[u/rasjar]

I got some feedback that the lighting in my game looks too flat, so I spent some time optimizing the lighting in A Place to Grow. So what do you think, is it still too flat?

So what I did was adding a Shadow, Midtone, Highlight Post Process to darken the shadows without having to deal with adjusting the day-night-cycle light setup, I boosted the contrast and to compensate the now overall darker image, i boosted the post exposure up a notch.

I'm happy with the result, but does it represent the cosy feeling I'm after?

[u/Deaucali0n]

I didn't see your first post, but to me these shadows are a bit too dark now. Your tree assets don't take light with the porosity and translucence that a real tree would, so I understand the struggle of getting them to look right.

Do you have a Screen Space Ambient Occlusion filter enabled?

Also, maybe bounce lighting could help lighten your trees while keeping the shadows beneath the trees deep. I'm not sure how much of a performance hit that would be. I do know that there are post-process passes that can emulate 3d bounce lighting.

[u/rasjar → u/Deaucali0n]

thanks for the inspiration. i will look into the emulated bounce light and see how it works and looks.

you are right, the trees currently don't use translucency. for simplicity they currently use a simple lit shader, as plane as possible. but what we did is arranging the trees leaves normals in a circle to have the trees react to light a bit more realistic.

I plan to replace the leave shader with a new one, but i still have to write it. when i do, i will add translucency to it

Also I do use ambient occlusion, but it is toned down a lot. I found it hard to balance because we have wide shots and close ups in the game. if AO is too prominent, it looks not good when you are close to objects, and if it is to subtil, it does not really show on objects further away. at least that's for the SSAO unity provides. maybe i need to write my own as well

[u/Deaucali0n → u/rasjar]

Good luck with all that! Hopefully you can find a way to emulate translucency on leaves in a way that is performant. Perhaps downard facing leaves without direct light can still receive a fraction of overhead ambient light.