VaM 1.x Best visual settings for my VN game?

[Sindrae]

Hey everyone,
I'm working on a VN project in VAM and wondering what you guys recommend for lighting, shaders and LUTs to get the best quality out of your scenes?

I’ve reached a certain level of image quality, but as far as I understand, keeping this quality consistent across different scenes is quite difficult. I'm especially struggling with outdoor scenes.
In indoor scenes, the character looks good, but since I'm using spotlights, the rest of the environment remains too dark and looks unnatural. If I brighten the surrounding areas, I end up losing the lighting quality on the character.
I've tried many plugins, but unfortunately I haven't been able to achieve the kind of quality I'm aiming for.
If anyone has experience with this or would like to share ideas and suggestions, please don't hesitate to chime in.

 

[DJ]

Some basic tips you may already know:

-Go to the "scene lighting" tab and turn it down to zero. The built in scene lighting is not good quality.
-Use Pixel lights only. Vertex lighting is computationally cheap, but low quality. Since you're just capturing images, though, the frame rate doesn't matter much.
-Pay attention to the range of your lights, and know that the shorter the range, the the more the intensity reduces with distance.
-There's a "pixel light limit" setting in user preferences; know that this limit doesn't apply to the number of pixel lights you can have in your scene, but how many can illuminate any one object. You can have short range pixel lights all over the place illuminating just your background to light it without changing lighting on the characters.
-Directional lights simulate sunlight or moonlight. light hits the entire scene from the direction the light controller is pointing; the location of the controller doesn't matter, just it's direction.
-Outdoor scenes can be tough because they probably have baked in lighting. It's always hard to light your scene to match the baked in lighting of the background. Consider the option of skipping the environment CUA's and using a background image on an image panel/image panel Emissive.
-Learn the basic principles of 3 point lighting. Understanding this makes lighting a lot easier.
-Also pay attention to shadow strength. Getting it right for a specific scene can make all the difference.