Light and shade…

Starting to get close to a look I’m happy with for the game so I figured I’d share a few notes on my setup. I’m aiming for a non-realistic, illustrative look, I want nice, distinct areas of flat colour, similar to watercolour washes or vector art, for this I’m using toon shaders and a ramp with no interpolation, i.e. solid bands of colour. Instead of the built-in shaders I’m using Toony Colors Pro and a great little tool called Ramps! which allows you to generate and adjust ramp textures right in the Unity editor, very handy for tweaking the look of things as you go…

I’m using the Normal/Multiple Lights/Basic variation of the above shader, with one small but important addition – the fullforwardshadows parameter. Adding this to the shader code just after the lightModel enables shadows on both point and spot lights and allows more than one light to cast shadows simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, this technique comes with pretty serious performance implications so that has to be considered when weighing up your options. Multiple shadow casters are pretty important to the look I’m after, light spilling out of doorways into a moonlit street is surprisingly tricky to achieve otherwise, and as of yet I haven’t found a way to get lightmapping to work successfully in a style I’m happy with (if I could isolate just the hard shadows that could be another option though!) For the majority of content I’m using a single, tiny grid of colours for the texture and adding details with TK2d sprites, so I’m hoping to claw a fair bit of performance back through batching. Also, graphic adventures aren’t overly reliant on high FPS anyway, atmosphere is much more important and, so far, scenes are still running at a more than adequate speed and that’s before any real attempt at optimising.

A couple of issues I have encountered are objects appearing back-lit or seeming to glow from within, this usually occurs if the darkest portion of your ramp isn’t completely black and the area in question isn’t completely in shadow:

I’m not a fan of 100% black, cast shadows, I like to use them more to add in a little extra detail and think they look best around 50%. In the above image, though, I want the exterior of the train to be dark until I add in directional moonlight, so we have to remove that “spill” somehow. I guess it helps to consider shadows and areas without light as separate issues to deal with? One solution is to ensure that your ramp has enough black at the end to compensate:

Using ramps with a lot of black can, however, result in “dead spots” occuring on flat surfaces with lights close by (floors/interior walls etc.) My solution at the moment is having several variants of my base shader, one for flat things, one for solid objects and another for self-illuminated stuff like strip lights and signs. Even with just these limited options though, I’ve been able to avoid issues in most scenarios, the Ramps! tool is super useful here, sometimes just a nudge in either direction is enough to fix huge swathes of “shadow acne”!

As always, I am far from an authority on this stuff, I’m mostly edging forward by feel alone, all crits, corrections and comments are therefore more than welcome…