Devlog 6

In this devlog I'll be talking about how I used some lighting and Shaders in my project.

Lighting

For the scene I have been working on in my previous devlogs there has been a brazier that has been used to light the area. In this devlog I changed it from using realtime lighting, to baked lightning. Realtime lighting is costly on performance and can lack the same sort of detail that baked lighting can provide.

Using baked lighting has created a much more believable lighting, with hard shadows around the base of brazier and nice shadows behind the objects around it. Seeing as all the calculations for the lighting is done only once, it is much more performant than what it was before, however as you can see the player now lacks a shadow as it is not counted as a static object, a.k.a it is an object that moves.

As you can see above, along with some other lighting tweaks, the shadows are much more realistic, surfaces further away from the light source are lit up and things are looking just overall nicer.

And finally having both at once creates a nice-looking scene where the player is lit up and there is also detail and realistic shadows.

Shadergraph

Shadergraph is a tool inside the Unity engine that allows you to easily create, edit and view shaders. These shaders can do many different things that vastly change how your game can look. it can be simple things from just making something glow to making flame-like effects.

To learn how to use Shadergraph I used Brackey's tutorial to make a model of a monkey's head glow.

From what I learned I wanted to make my own shader, I decided to get the slime from one of my previous devlogs and make that have an effect that would make it seem more corrosive or slime-like.

I ended up spending a while figuring out how noise shaders worked and came up with this okay looking effect.

Along with the animation, it kind of brings life to the creature, however, this shader very obviously reveals the seams in the texture which is a notable problem. This is like something to do with the UV of the object and maybe something I should consider next time I am modelling something.