Game Lighting Tips And Tricks?

bharatnag

Hi all I'm trying to put up a small game and have a lot of question regarding industry standards and some general tips and trick regarding lighting, texturing, light baking and stuff. I wish to learn here and hope that others would also benifit.

So I'll start with this one question that has been haunting me for a while now. How do you do emissive meshes with glow. I tried using the emissive slots in the shaders in unity but the result is so fake. I could never get that magnifiscent halo of glow around an object as depicted in the images attached below. How to approach this aspect of lighting a scene? I use unity and presently Im tinkering around with unity 5 beta.

BagelHero

Edit: Never mind, you figured it out. :thumbup:

Do you have any Post FX? Light sources? Or just the emissive map in a fairly basic scene?

Shrike

emissive materials can not glow unless you have a bloom post effect. Unreal 4 has post effects all set by default, thats why you see it there.

Bloom takes the brightest spots on your screen, makes a mask, "copies" and blurs them, adding this glow effect you want. This has nothing to do with actual lighting however.

Post effects are unity Pro only, just add one of the bloom effects to your camera, by clicking on the camera, add component and search for one of the bloom effects.

bharatnag

Thanks for replying. Consider I am to start with some approach. Consider I have nothing as of now @ BagelHero.

Thanks Shrike. Ok I get it Emissive maps plus a bloom. Is that It? I think the post effects are really taxing for the hardware. Say for example mobile devices. Are there any other methods to fake these or an optimized bloom is the way to go ahead?

BagelHero

On the mobile game I'm currently working on (a 2D puzzler) we use 2D "glow" sprites overlayed on top or behind some things. This can still get a little heavy, though, if you need this as a particle effect, or you need lots of them (overdraaaaaw). I could imagine if it's just one or two things this might work in 3D.

But yeah, what Shrike said basically.

Eric Chadwick

You can definitely use bloom on mobile. It just has to be optimized. One way is to render the scene at 1/4 the resolution (or less) and use that for the bloom source.

Bloom can also add a nice softening effect to the scene, if used judiciously.

Deadly Nightshade

Also, you can bake the emissive glow to a lightmap as well. We are doing that in our current game. It´s not as good as a bloom post-FX ofc but it´s very lightweight.