Weekly Wisby 9: Half of this post is a rant about lights

So what happened was, I started writing about this course I did on Unity realtime lighting… and I wouldn’t shut up about it. If you’re not a complete tech-nerd like me, you might want to skip the next part. If, however, you like torturing yourself with listening to the ramblings of an old fool (me) then I would advise you to seek help after reading my lighting rant.

Remember this picture? Last week I was playing around with lights and making shadows look amazeballs. This week I focused on learning another aspect of the lighting process. You know how if you are standing in a dark room and you shine a flashlight on the wall you can see the whole room, not just the part you’re shining on? In Unity that process is called global illumination (GI). To illustrate:

No bounce light = no red box.

As you now understand, omitting GI in a game so focused on visuals is not gonna cut the cheese. Thankfully its baking process is not at all one laden with specificity that takes hours to optimize.

For example, learning the intricates of Unity’s Realtime GI Precomputation setup took only 2 hours. And who wouldn’t want to spent their time discovering why Lightmap-UV’s use half a texel of padding to enable light-stitching?

I’ll stop, I’ll stop. I can imagine you might not care as much as I about these technical details, naaah… you just want results. Like this!

Remember: everything in shadow would be completely dark if not for Global Illumination.

Lighting reflects of the metal parts of the shield.

Quality atmosphere.

This Viking village comes from this course btw.

Now you may be so naïve to think “2 hours of work for these results!? That wasn’t so bad, what are you whining about?!” Yeah no, I wish it were that easy. I may have gotten these results after 2 hours of reading, but if you are unfamiliar then let me clue you in on “the baking process”. Light baking is letting your computer calculate how all this lighting ‘works’. Usually you’ll want to bake often so you can iterate quickly. This bake… took 7 and a half hours. That… is miserable.

No this course was just starting out. There is a lot of nuances into optimizing this scene so the baking process takes no longer than 3 minutes. It has tricks for removing small objects from the bake, optimizing large objects like the buildings and fine tuning the settings. The small objects stuff is especially tedious, you need to create sort of a “fake light cage” for them to use… it looks like this:

If it seems an absolute mess… yeah it’s supposed to look like that.

Alright, this was my lighting rant. Fun aside I actually really enjoy this online course on it, it is teaching me a lot of things I didn’t know about.

Hakan, one of our teachers for this course, wanted us to get an initial audience response. …Only problem is that we really didn’t have much to show yet. We are working on it (I mean just read above) but as far as art goes that’s still in the “paper block out” phase, and showing a bunch of gray squares walking around… well first impressions matter.

We did however have some concept art floating around (see Weekly Wisby 7), so I picked it up and wrote a story around it, something like “this is our 2.5D game, it’s called Break It, you walk and interact to make the world color up.”

Here’s our first response:

This guy is my hero.

We got some… auxiliary comments as well.

As well as some much-appreciated love.

Doing all this community stuff is fun… but sometimes I just wanna see my baby again and dive into Unity. In our game we want you to be able to go out to the balcony and have the outside of the house visible. Basically, we need to hide the wall when you’re inside, but show it when you’re outside. That seemed like a fun enough challenge, so through a combination of triggers and shader-magic, I made this!

Sorry for talking about the project so much but hey sometimes that’s just what life is ya know? It’s goin’ full steam with no stopin’! Still: gotta have a relief. So on Saturday I went on a bus tour with the one, the only, Mikael Norbii. The man does student tours, for free, and he’s a great story teller.

This is a cliff where dozens of medieval ships crashed while fleeing from invaders. Also the guy in the middle is Mikael.

Here’s an old fishers-town. Clans from the mainland would go here for a week to catch as much fish as they could to sell and eat back home.

A family-of-four residence looks like this: just a kitchen and some beds.

They had very make-shift ‘light-houses’ if you could call them that so they could fish at night without getting lost.

These stakes would be used to dry their fishnets.

We also visited this church, with a lower mid-roof because they ran out of money.

Also this.

These rocks don't look that impressive until you realize it’s a medieval mass-grave. The background-rocks are more graves.

And our final stop was this simply mesmerizing beach. Mikael certainly knows how to end a day of culture:

By letting us go rock-climbing.

Finishing my week was the last tests and setup required to polish… *drumroll… OUR DISCORD SERVER! Now it’s fully operational ready to be invaded by community members. IF WE HAD ANY! Nah just kidding, that’s my job, and the job I’ll be working on for the coming month. Just 30 people by the end of November (1 people a day) would make me exhilarated. Better hop to it!