[WIP] Enlighten Contest - Chromatic Dreams

jessnado

Really late to this challenge but I''ll take this time to finally start learning and exploring Unity. I spent a few hours thinking about what I wanted to do until finally deciding on lighting. Below you can view some examples and even more on a Pinterest board I created. The courtyard itself is a fairly simple environment with strong architectural elements. These inspiration images heavily depend on lighting and photographic composition to make them incredibly interesting to look at.


As a personal challenge, I deleted all the lighting, reflection probes, and additional meshes that were not part of the environment. I then noted a few camera angles that I'd like to work with and started exploring different lighting, sun, and skysphere settings. From there I came up with these two shots and I'll pick up tomorrow to explore additional angles and color combinations.

jessnado

Started being more adventurous with color palettes, getting closer to the results I'm looking to achieve. It could also be the sleep deprivation.

jessnado

Spent most of tonight learning about post processing effects, trying not to go too bloom crazy. Likewise with chromatic aberration which I accidentally set it to 3200 and got this guy at the bottom.

jessnado

Working on some final tweaks before submission! I've adjusted the colors a bit more on the top images to make a wide color palette.

bent_vector

Great use of color. Where is that second-to-last picture from? I can't place it.

jessnado

It's the same location as my last photo, different angle from the base of the stairs. Here's a cleaner view you'll probably recognize it better~ 

HeliosDoubleSix

Love the Colors! I was hoping to see entries that took the use of color and light to it's extreme and you did!

HeliosDoubleSix

I recommend you look into using hidden meshes that can then emit light with an emissive material, this works better than using point or spot lights as it correctly shadows/occludes by walls and floors, and you can then use rainbow textures to easily spit out colored light, main con is you have to rebake the scene every time you move an emissive mesh, so in that case spotlights with a short range and a light cookie can do wonders, setting a higher bounce and short range helps you inject light into a scene without the light passing thru a wall or floor, so to get nice indirect and colored shadowed you can point a short range spot light at a wall and rely on the light bouncing off that wall to be nice and soft, versus relying on realtime shadows which look crappy and drain performance, and while you cannot have colored light cookies you can duplicate a light 3 times and put Red Green and Blue in each one respectively as a cheat ;-) the trick is to keep the contrast high, Color is perceived brightest when it is next to an opposite color so red next to blue, orange and purple which you clearly know and have used to great effect, and of course a bright light source next to a dark shadow so getting the light to bounce around enough but not too much as to make it look washed out and overly ambient.

jessnado

HeliosDoubleSix said:

I recommend you look into using hidden meshes that can then emit light with an emissive material, this works better than using point or spot lights as it correctly shadows/occludes by walls and floors, and you can then use rainbow textures to easily spit out colored light, main con is you have to rebake the scene every time you move an emissive mesh, so in that case spotlights with a short range and a light cookie can do wonders, setting a higher bounce and short range helps you inject light into a scene without the light passing thru a wall or floor, so to get nice indirect and colored shadowed you can point a short range spot light at a wall and rely on the light bouncing off that wall to be nice and soft, versus relying on realtime shadows which look crappy and drain performance, and while you cannot have colored light cookies you can duplicate a light 3 times and put Red Green and Blue in each one respectively as a cheat ;-) the trick is to keep the contrast high, Color is perceived brightest when it is next to an opposite color so red next to blue, orange and purple which you clearly know and have used to great effect, and of course a bright light source next to a dark shadow so getting the light to bounce around enough but not too much as to make it look washed out and overly ambient.

Thank you for these tips! This was the first time I even tried lighting a scene so this is really great information.