Nice tip for people unaware of 3 point lighting.
That said, If you don't mind, recommending Very High on shadows is not that ideal ^^
The diff between high and very high is abysmal, and the diff between high and medium, is not that horrible especially on characters (it's a bit more obvious on the enviro). It's generally better to contextualize settings based on usage ( video, realtime etc ) and hardware.
For instance :
Left is all lights at medium, right is all lights are very high. The scene is a single character and three pointlights. It's a 11 frame per second sink for something you barely notice on characters if your lights are properly configured and well placed/thought out. And there's nothing in there. When you drop in VR, with 2 characters and the animation tanks your framerate, these 11 fps are important.
Now, light settings "alone" is kind of an agnostic approach. One light in a basic 6 sided cube room, with one character with a specific set of settings, will perform drastically different than the same light in a room with a massive amount of shadow casters and one character. If you top that with unoptimized meshes or shadow casters, you can tank the framerate with that same light.
Also, hardware matters. If you're like me on a 50xx generation, these GPUs eat polygons and shadow casters for breakfast...
Something you feel like it's nothing for your GPU can be a massive frame sink for 1, 2 or 3 gens of GPU ago.
Besides that, thank you for your cool videos <3
Additional ideas / suggestions for people not used to light a scene :
- Spot light tend to be "cuter/nicer" in some situation and also have a tendency to reduce banding. They can be used with wide angles to have a different ambiant feeling compared to points.
- Overhead for lights is more of a per poly/per pixel (to simplify). If you prefer computing a pixel with 5 lights hitting it, is way more expensive than the same pixel with only 2 lights on it. So spacing out lights can improve framerate
- GI, or reflection probes (using SkyMagic Loader) can help leveraging a nice ambiant light. Which could allow you to drop down to 2 lights instead of 3. (this requires to create proper reflection probe tho!)
- Shadow strength is important for the look, do not forget to experiment with it.
- Have at least on light with sharper shadows to create depth on the characters.
