Ambient lighting in a dynamic scene: high level thoughts?

Getting Started
1

Hello! I’m somewhat new to Unity, very new to the forums for sure. Please bare with my newbness. :wink:

798×393 92.6 KB

I’m building a VR experiment using pre-built components from the assets store (very helpful!). Everything is working out so far minus the actual VR part (later when I access equipment), but I do have some mouse head look working and a basic scene setup.

Ambient lighting: With a goal to get this ship bridge scene to “fly” to different planets, I expect wild changes in ambient lighting, beyond skybox. Currently I have lighting baking, which is cool, but this may look strange when the outer scene lighting changes.

I’m guessing I can turn ambient lighting off in the light baking, correct? Is ambient lighting a dynamic option that can change in real-time? Will I need to move some point lights around outside of this scene to simulate light that reflects from planets and suns?

Thanks for taking a look. Since the player in this sim-of-sorts will not be moving much, lighting seems like a critical piece to set the mode of changing situations. I’ll have to address other types of lighting as well (e.g. red alert), but that’s another topic. Ambiance is the big one on my mind at the moment.

Thanks for taking a look! I’m learning much. :smile:

2

Now that I start playing with settings, I’m thinking that a good general space skybox would be fine for ambient light (seems to be dynamic). Then, when approaching a planet, fade in some additional lighting outside the window to give an added effect. Sound right? Thanks for a place to ramble as I work through it.

3

If you’re making a space game a low ambience across the board (like .15-.2) and careful use of lights should produce decent results for most “in space” scenes since there will usually only be a few light sources.

1 Like