Question Natural lighting?

[Russel]

Is there a way to create soft, natural lighting in VaM using a single light source? Majority of VaM scenes are too dark, with dramatic lighting, harsh shadows and too much contrast (for my liking).

I used to do portrait photography and always loved the look of photos taken in a large room with white walls and one or two large windows with sheer curtains (no direct sunlight). The white walls would reflect and bounce the light around acting as fill light. The gradual, gentle light falloff created very soft shadows that added just enough dimensionality without appearing harsh.

Would I need to add a large 3-wall "light box" around the scene and add a directional light at a 45-degree angle above where the 4th wall would be?

Thanks in advance!

 

[hazmhox]

You won't be able to lit a scene properly with a single light and especially without proper raytracing if you're intention is to get some fake "bounce" aspect.

Giving you exact pointers on what distance, angle, size, is pretty much impossible, because a lot of factors are responsible of a nice look. If you take one of my shots that I do find very natural:

This is lit by three lights. But you can't replicate this by simply saying "hey I had a light here at X° and that position".
The factors in the final results are :

• The skin (material) of the character
• The light intensity, shadow settings, angle for a spot, distance
• The color of the light
• and eventually your GI (this is optional)

There is not exact answer, especially on a now raytracing engine. You'll have to fiddle around : )

 

[epus]

Plausible lighting in VAM is an interesting can of worms.

The white walls would reflect and bounce the light around acting as fill light.

The fastest and cheapest way to imitate that would be to use VAM's global illumination (found under "Session Lighting"). A lot of scenes dial this down to zero and adding just a little bit back in and choosing an appropriate cubemap can improve "realism" quite a bit. You can also rotate that cubemap to better match its main light source with the scene.

Sadly, as far as I know, VAM's rendering shaders don't integrate with Unity's Light- and Reflection Probes at all, meaning CustomUnityAssets (i.e. imported environments and props) will not be affected by VAM's global illumination which makes them look inconsistent compared to VAM atoms in the scene. Only light atoms affect both VAM atoms and CUAs which is why creators sometimes fall back to light atoms only.

To bridge the gap you can either use UnityAssetVamifier (several authors, link is to the most current bugfixed version I know) on a CUA and hope it converts every material property to the correct VAM shader equivalent or you can try to sync VAM's session lighting with Unity's reflection probes via SkyMagic. But the process to create a shared reflection cubemap is quite involved and you have to decide the rotation upfront. There are some ready-made resources you can use here (be sure to try them both with and without sRGB colorspace if the scene looks over- or under-exposed).

Hopefully VAM2 re-thinks its approach to lighting

 

[Russel]

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it! Looks like it isn't as easy to achieve this in VaM as it is in the real world.

@hazmhox That lighting does look very nice! Wish more creators lit their scenes with similar lighting.

 

[hazmhox]

Sadly, as far as I know, VAM's rendering shaders don't integrate with Unity's Light- and Reflection Probes at all, meaning CustomUnityAssets (i.e. imported environments and props) will not be affected by VAM's global illumination which makes them look inconsistent compared to VAM atoms in the scene. Only light atoms affect both VAM atoms and CUAs which is why creators sometimes fall back to light atoms only.

To bridge the gap you can either use UnityAssetVamifier (several authors, link is to the most current bugfixed version I know) on a CUA and hope it converts every material property to the correct VAM shader equivalent or you can try to sync VAM's session lighting with Unity's reflection probes via SkyMagic. But the process to create a shared reflection cubemap is quite involved and you have to decide the rotation upfront. There are some ready-made resources you can use here (be sure to try them both with and without sRGB colorspace if the scene looks over- or under-exposed).

Even tho everything is accurate in what epus says, I would recommend not using Vamifier technic if you have the skillset to use your own enviro. (this is implies you have the skillset)
For two reasons:

• Vamifier does not work on custom shaders ( you could try on my enviros, it won't work )
• 90% of the time, I find the vamifier result less clean/appealing than a proper enviro without vamifier.

Since the spherical harmonics fix on SkyMagic, you can safely use / create a custom enviro and get a very very clean results with reflection probes and custom shaders. You're not limited to the old specular workflow of VAM.

Add to that a proper lighting in the enviro, and you can have really nice scenes without needing more than 3 lights.
( I'm cheating a bit here, it's half baked, half realtime with reflection probes )

 

[SlimerJSpud]

IMO, the global lighting in Vam looks terrible, unless it's kept at a very low level. It washes everything out. Because Vam has to render in real time, compromises have to be made in lighting. You can get nice results with the built-in 3-point light rig, if you know how to adjust the parameters. There are also more elaborate light rigs available on the hub, if you want a more push-button solution.

 

[hazmhox]

IMO, the global lighting in Vam looks terrible, unless it's kept at a very low level.

Yeah lol. I think "global lighting" is a language misuse in VAM haha.

It's just a flat color pumped into the shader and there's not even a screenspace occlusion to make it somewhat kind of "accurate". It's ok at very low level to simulate your ambiant bounce at best.

 

[moonminer]

Based on my experience, using 3-4 focused light sources for a character setup is the best approach.