When making a game using the Unity engine, you may find it hard to make the game look realistic. Here are some tips and tricks to make your game look better and more realistic.
PBR maps
Most of the time when making materials, you will probably be using Diffuse/Albedo Map in combination with Normal Map. While Diffuse and Normal might be enough, you should also use Metalness and Smoothness maps for a more defined texture. You might also want to use Height Map to further simulate bumps on the material, Occlusion Map for baking Ambient Occlusion, and even detail Diffuse and Normal maps for small details.
Baked lightings
Sometimes when making a scene, real-time lighting might not be enough to make the scene look good. This is where baked global illumination(GI), shadows, and reflections come in. The basic idea of GI is that you bake indirect light bounces in the engine's editor, then have the baked lights applied onto static objects. On the other hand, baked shadows are basically like real-time shadows, but you bake it instead and not render it in real-time to save on rendering time and baked reflections are just 6-sided cube maps.
Post Processing
While optional, post-processing effects can help make your game look much better. These are some of the post-processing effects in PPv2 that I recommend you should use.
Color Grading This effect increases the contrast between bright and dark colors. While the settings might be confusing, most of the time you will only be setting the tone mapper settings to ACES and changing the post-exposure value. Note that if you find the game looking too dark, you can increase the post-exposure to 1.5, or increase the sun brightness to 1.5 and that you should use linear color space.
Bloom This effect simulates the light bleeding from a brighter area to a darker area. Set the intensity to 1 and you're good to go.
Ambient Occlusion If you're not someone who likes to use baked AO, you should use this effect instead. I recommend that the intensity setting should not exceed 0.5 otherwise it could make occluded areas look too dark when used in combination with ACES tonemapper.
Other settings and tweaks
Color Space In the project settings, go to Player settings > Other settings and change the color space to linear. More information here.
Deferred Rendering On any camera(preferably the main one), change the rendering path to Deferred. More information here. Please note that MSAA will be unavailable when using deferred rendering
Author's note: This is my first time writing a blog post. I apologize in advance if I missed anything important or if something I wrote is confusing.
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