Hello everyone. I wanted to show you something I’ve been working on last couple of FAFFs. The purpose of this post is to interest some of the technical types among you. If you don’t care about a technical discussion about an unfinished feature, you can just read about the basics or jump right to the video showing some WIP pretty pixels.
The Basics
The problem we are trying to solve is how to use baked lighting on dynamic objects and characters. After lightmapping a scene all static objects have nice, high quality lighting. If we don’t do anything about the dynamic objects though, they might look dull and detached from the environment with their direct light and ambient only.
One solution is to use light probes to sample the nice baked lighting at various points in the scene. We can then interpolate the nearby probes to guess what would the lighting be at the current location of our character (or other moving object) and use the result to light the character.
Let’s see how it looks like in action! (Apologies for the cheesy lighting with over the top light bounce, but it makes it easier to illustrate the effect)
Read more: Unity 3D blog