Here’s an image and I’ll point out what I’m looking to achieve which this game does and I’ll explain, with my limited graphics knowledge, what I think it does (somewhat) and what I tried and failed.
In the image above, there’s a separation of what’s interior and exterior. You can see that the exterior shadows are stronger. Inside, the shadows are lighter and they do seem to be realtime from a 90% angle (top-down) directional light. I watched the game play and saw the shadows match the meshes’ movement (not a blob projector). Also, the objects, like tables, have shadows below them.
Important assumption: I believe all the lights are realtime, because you can change the interior (build walls, rooms, place objects). Maybe they use “lightmapped prefabs”, but it doesn’t change the fact that the characters drop shadows in realtime from a top-down angle.
I tried the Built-in renderer with 2 directional lights, with different culling masks. The interior directional light pointing down doesn’t look like what I expected, because of the highlight on the top of the mesh. One way I could make it work was to have one mesh to be shadows-only and having another not casting shadows, within another layer, and the ambient light really bright.
This doesn’t look right. Having two objects and animating them at the same time (walking, running, sitting, moving arms, etc).
What I noticed from the game’s rendering: the characters look brighter than the environment (interior), in general - probably the textures are set up like that so they look more prominent.
The walls drop shadow for the exterior light - probably having a mesh on the exterior layer only for shadows.
What I need help with: how can I actually achieve this? This simple interior and exterior lighting without using other light sources (I’m aware they can get expensive fast). (Yes, I noticed the point lights on the walls)
I was trying URP, but I know that we can only have shadows for one Directional Light. I was thinking of using Rendering Layers, but with that Directional Light “limitation” I gave up.