My game looks like poo and I can’t get it to look better within my abilities.

[sacred hatch]

I am a complete beginner to unity and c# and have looked all over YouTube but not one tutorial has helped my game look aesthetically pleasing. Here is a list of everything that I cannot fix:

• post processing, bloom either works on everything or nothing. I want it to be on bright things only
• textures, they are gray and dull, never look like they do in the photo editors
• shadows, my terrain is fine but everything else stays bright even when there is no light source
• lighting is suuuupeer bad and I need to learn how to stylize my game but I can’t figure it out

If anyone thinks they can assist, help would be so much greatly appreciated

[waxen root]

Bloom is made to make bright colors bleed into adjucent pixels. If you don't it to happen on some objects, make them less bright or modify the threshold param on the bloom settings.

Textures being gray and dull is not very descriptive. Share screenshots of what they look like vs what you expect them to look like.

Sounds like you're using unit materials or have receive shadows disabled? Hard to say for sure without seeing the issue.

Same for lighting. Can't say anything without seeing the issue...

[old fjord]

This isn't a specific question, it's more of a "teach me how to use unity", so it's hard to give you all the answers you need.

You certainly didn't watch all the tutorials you need. Otherwise, you'd understand how bloom works. You need to increase it's threshold.

Bloom threshold means "colors over X intesnsity will bloom, and under X intensity won't bloom". If you have it on a low value, everything will bloom.

Everything being bring is most likely you using ambient lighting from a strong skybox.

The textures and other comments are pretty much impossible to address without seeing what's going on

[sacred hatch]

here is a photo of the shadow problem, the materials of all other objects have the same lighting problem. Also, the main directional light has intensity set to 0 for demonstration.

if you need my lighting settings i can provide them.

[swift scarab]

Do that

[sacred hatch]

if i change lighting source to skybox everything gets super dark and if i change the intensity nothing happens

[swift scarab]

Set environment lighting source to skybox and make sure its intensity 1 and reflection intensity is 1
Then show Scene tab of lighting settings

[swift scarab]

Disable Realtime Global Illumination and Baked Global Illumination and then Generate lighting

[sacred hatch]

everything is just slightly tinted green now

[swift scarab]

Equally? Ground not darker than the character

[sacred hatch]

yeah

[swift scarab]

Then you can enable the directional light

[sacred hatch]

oh wait nvm its still broken

[swift scarab]

"Broken"?

[sacred hatch]

green and dark floor

[swift scarab]

Could show the material properties of the floor

[sacred hatch]

its a terrain

[swift scarab]

Have you painted on it with terrain texture layers?

[sacred hatch]

yeah

[swift scarab]

Could've said so right away
Show the settings of the layers you've painted with

[swift scarab]

Set AO to 1 on all of them

[sacred hatch]

the terrain now has a green glow

[swift scarab]

AO stands for ambient occlusion, and it determines how much ambient light is absorbed by the surface
So since the only incoming light was ambient, you got none

[swift scarab]

Show that?

[swift scarab]

Also set Height to 0 on all of them

And Normal Scale to 0 too for now anyway
The normal maps don't look quite right to me

[sacred hatch]

i generated them with an addon

[swift scarab]

What addon?

[sacred hatch]

Normal map maker by mgear

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/normal-map-maker-10388

[swift scarab]

Doesn't indicate if they're generated right
Generally normal maps should appear light blue and pinkish like in the promo there
But yours are more like a stronger lighter blue
The normal data has to be exact to work properly
Anyway, normal maps are secondary to getting the material to work with lighting at all

So remove the maps or set the Scale to 0

[sacred hatch]

i did

[swift scarab]

And how does it look

[sacred hatch]

the same

[swift scarab]

At this stage you should disable that terrain and create a new one
With its setup totally default it should appear correctly

[sacred hatch]

ok, but can you tell me why everything is green?

[sacred hatch]

also, if i add any new layer to a new terrain it turns dark like before

[swift scarab]

Turns dark from looking like what first?

[sacred hatch]

looks like this again when i add more than 1 layer

[swift scarab]

Before that what did it look like?

[swift scarab]

Your skybox is fairly green, it's expected that when your scene's only light source is ambient, the lighting will be relatively green

Direct lighting will typically balance it out

[sacred hatch]

thsi doesnt look green to me

[swift scarab]

A reason for it could be that your settings in this tab aren't still quite right, or that the skybox material is not quite right

[sacred hatch]

im also getting whatever this is but i dont know if its related

[swift scarab]

Unity's internal errors less often are related

So far there has been misconfigured settings affecting your lighting in every place I've asked to see
That can easily happen when you're starting out and trying things but it may be best to make a new project and try setting things up again, trying to avoid the previous pitfalls and catching the moment when things go wrong

To recap
Your objects should be lit by ambient lighting, the objects receiving light in shadow is not the problem but your ground receiving no indirect light at all is
But also this ambient lighting should match the skybox, which you get by generating lighting with ambient and reflection sources as skybox, with 1 multiplier and a shader on the sky material that is actually a sky shader

Realtime GI and Baked GI should not be used when generating lighting unless you know what they are and how to use them

Your terrain layer material properties had issues preventing indirect lighting, so don't set them all at once before testing what their real effect is (and do read from the docs what they are meant to do)