How do I light dynamic objects eg.characters?

Hello,

I’m a novice and am completely lost here. I don’t seem to be able to light up my characters properly in the scene. Are there any tricks to lighting dynamic objects?

Also, when I import a scene which has lightmaps, what happens if I place additionnal lights inside Unity? Will my scene be affected by this? Or is there a way of excluding the scene from being lit? Is there such a thing as negative lighting to make an area darker?

I would really appreciate any help I could get! Thanks!

In the inspector at top right there is an area marked layers. In there you define a layer that can be rendered by a particular light.

If you import a lightmapped scene, depending on these layers, you can add more light, hence the lightmapped/bump shader etc.

If you select a light and look in the inspector, you can see a slot about halfway down (which is called culling mask from memory), and here you define what the selected light illuminates, based on the layer you set the object to. So for cheap lighting, you can import a lightmapped file, and have the light in unity illuminate ONLY the dynamic assets.

Hope that gets a better result. Try changing the lighting to force pixel for higher quality/lower performance. Also skinned(Charactermeshes) have a skin normals checkbox which changes the appearance. Go to you bound model to find that in the inspector

Good luck and dont forget to post some screenshots!
AC

Hi Targos,

Thanks for your help! :slight_smile:
By the way, do you know how many lights should be used for a level without affecting the frame rate? Or is it just a matter of testing until it gets too slow?

KF

Make sure that each object is hit only by very few light sources, especially pixel-lights. When you handle that with care, i guess there can be hundreds of light-sources in a single scene without dropping performance too much.