Lighting a Dynamic Procedurally Generated Scene

[warm cipher]

Hey all, I'm quite a beginner at lighting. I've only ever done simple baked lighting into some static scenes in the past.

I'm working on my first procedurally generated scene. It's an infinite runner that generates more chunks of world as the player progresses. The world has a single static area at the start of the level to server as a starting position, then every bit of map after that is generated as the player progresses.

The scene is a green nature low-poly scene; I'm trying to make it all look a bit less flat. I've attached some screenshots to show the current scene. The farm plot area up to the fences is static, all the roads past that are generated in chunks (one chunk is selected in one of the images). You can see especially on the house and big tree that the lighting and shadows just look horrible with the single default Directional Light.

I'm looking for some tips or direction on how to go about lighting the static and dynamic parts of this scene and also how to blend them nicely. Any thoughts or recommendations would be much appreciated! 🙂

Side note: if anyone knows how to fix these sharp and awful looking distant white lines on the roads let me know!

[hollow oracle]

For flat shaded meshes, I would look for low poly shaders that are specifically made for such geometry. Other than good shaders, the lighting set up does not often need to be more than some ambient light, one directional light and add bit of post processing on top. Especially those shadows/shades almost pitch dark don't usually play very well trogether with the cartoonish look that you are probably looking for. Many low poly/cartoon/toon shaders take that into account automatically. The default shader at least used to produce really flat ambient lighting which may not be what you want either. The default shaders use more of a PBR lighting models (aimed for realism) which is likely not what you are looking for. You can find ton of those shaders from the asset store and elsewhere on the internet.

You could probably get similar results with some tricks like using two directional lights (with different directions), only one of them casting shadows, appropriate amount of ambient light and post processing. I recommend looking for inspiration from other low poly style games out there to get an idea to which direction you want to move and what exactly is wrong with your current lighting set up

Talking of those white lines, you probably want to look into different anti-aliasing methods available. If the lines are based on texture, you should also look into anisotropic texture filtering (anisoLevel of the texture) which helps to reduce noise on angled textures

[warm cipher]

Thanks for the reply! I've never used shaders before so I'm a little confused on where to begin with them. After a bit of research most of the low poly shaders I come across are aimed towards turning higher quality scenes into low poly scenes. For a scene like mine where I already have it full of low poly assets, would using a shader like that benefit me? Are there shaders also aimed at improving the look and feel of low poly textures rather than "converting" them to low poly? Or should I stick with the default shaders and focus on trying to fix these issues more with lighting?

[warm cipher]

I tried bumping this up to 16 on the texture for the roads but I wasn't able to see a visible difference unfortunately

[hollow oracle]

Shaders literally draw meshes. It is up to the shader code how that is done. I’m talking of shaders that draw low poly mesh, not convert from high to low poly. Shaders define what the meshes will look, the unitys default ones are often not great for cartoonish style. I would look for shaders with keywords ”low poly”, ”cartoon” and ”toon” at least.

[warm cipher]

Oh I see, makes sense. I'll poke around then and see if I can find any that fit my needs. Thanks!

[hollow oracle]

Many stylized/cartoonish games have their custom shaders for best fit with the desired style and potentially better performance than any more general solution. Writing such shaders isn’t particularly easy though without prior knowledge so looking for existing solutions is probably the way to go.