Lighting Techniques for Stylized Environments in Unity 5.5+
polycounter lvl 2
Hello my fellow Artists 
I opened this threat to show one of my lighting tests for stylized environments in Unity 5.5. My plan is to create a scene with mostly handpainted assets made 3D and 2.5D like in the new version of Summoner's Rift from LoL or in Diablo 3 (TopDown-View). I'm just at the beginning and decided to use Unity as engine. It should be possible to create a nice, artistic environment there, especially with the new lighting tools.
However I've already experimented a bit with it, just including some dummy cubes and textures. Everything is at an early stage yet. I made a first attempt to the light and AO settings. The following GIF shows some variations of more or less exaggerated AO. You can also see what kind of artstyle I want to go for in this project.
Your feedback and advice on how to use inbuilt tools of Unity 5 regarding the lighting for scenes like this one at best is very welcome. I'd really like to read about your experience on similar projects / technical experiments.
So long!
I opened this threat to show one of my lighting tests for stylized environments in Unity 5.5. My plan is to create a scene with mostly handpainted assets made 3D and 2.5D like in the new version of Summoner's Rift from LoL or in Diablo 3 (TopDown-View). I'm just at the beginning and decided to use Unity as engine. It should be possible to create a nice, artistic environment there, especially with the new lighting tools.
However I've already experimented a bit with it, just including some dummy cubes and textures. Everything is at an early stage yet. I made a first attempt to the light and AO settings. The following GIF shows some variations of more or less exaggerated AO. You can also see what kind of artstyle I want to go for in this project.
Your feedback and advice on how to use inbuilt tools of Unity 5 regarding the lighting for scenes like this one at best is very welcome. I'd really like to read about your experience on similar projects / technical experiments.
So long!
Replies
The trouble with baking AO in Unity though is you need a decent lightmap resolution to make it work, and as the scene increases in size a larger lightmap starts to become a real memory hog.
Have you looked into SSAO? There's a decent component in the free image effects package (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51515), and there are better more refined ones in the Asset Store. I've used SSAO Pro, it's pretty good.
thank you for your answer. I also think a more decent AO is better.
I agree with you on that memory issue, this tiny scene already requires 24MB with 9 directional maps... Will see how many Lightmaps would have to be calculated when there are a lot of objects in the scene.
Do you think it's possible to achieve a similar result with screenspace AO? I hope there is no visual disadvantage when using this in the free version of Unity, as far as I know there should be no difference anymore.
So long! :-)
A nice thing to add to a stylized look is a rim effect, fresnel in the shader.
Stylized fx is also neat. I made a painterly torch fire shader; the motion, color, and intensity adds a lot of visual interest.
thank you for your help, got some things to try out now. :-)