Hi there, I have been following unity for a while since when i was in college for game design 2 years ago. I loved the ease of use of unity, but for me, something was always… missing. My passion is creating horror games, the kind where you are absolutely helpless in your struggle to overcome odds with nothing to protect yourself but your wits and your evasive maneuvering. Here in was my problem with unity, I always felt it lacked graphical substance, not matter how many hours I put in to working at fixing it, the shadows were always blocky looking, and the lighting felt too stark i.e they lacked depth, just solid white solid yellow etc. These things really frustrated me when trying to achieve the feel I truely wanted to accomplish in my game, I’m not asking for cryengine environment shaders or anything like that, just something that can really help me set the tone, so to speak. I guess what I am asking is, how far have these things come along? Are the shadows able to be softer? can the lighting be made to feel like light and not something out of old flat shaded source games? I am interested in buying unity 4 pro but i would like the communities opinion on these maters. last time I used unity, I believe it was version 2.6 or so.
Yeah, the lighting in Unity 3 is much better than it was in Unity 2. Unity 4 is probably better again.
I suggest checking out a few Unity games and seeing if they exhibit the flaws that bothered you.
Having said that, these things take time, skill and practise. Even though Unity’s lighting is now much better than it used to be, in the past you could still make pretty decent looking stuff if you knew what you were doing.
Yea, I was able to achieve some effects to what i wanted, but it always felt like i had to trick unity in to doing what i wanted it to, or i would have to do some really round-about things to accomplish this, like if i wanted blood to splash on the screen i had to do it with a plane -_- and that never looked good lol i could always download the pro tiral, but i dont want to waste it incase i want to wait for a later version to check out those features :-\
The way you talk about it I imagine you had the free version?
I don’t even bother messing with shadows most of the time since they are just blah in Unity free.(not complaining at all I am very grateful that I can explore my hobby at no cost other than my time)
Can’t afford a Pro license or I would have one.
That said I have seen some pretty nice shadow effects made in pro.
I’m not quite sure what you expect. All game development is just “tricks”…that’s how it’s done, always. There’s no magic “make it look nice” button, it’s all about experience and effort on your part.
–Eric
Pretty much my thoughts here.
Even with Unity 2.6 you can create something that does not look ‘flat and old’. Ever seen Avert Fate?
Besides that, this is a question you can figure out by yourself. Just look at Unity’s official gallery, or into the showcase forum to see what Unity is capable of. Youtube is also your friend here.
Oh the times I wished there was
Nah…it would be cool at first but then you’d get bored. 
–Eric
^^This.
And the work required to make things look nice, is WORTH it! 
I started using curvature maps recently
OP could you elaborate more on what was giving you trouble or post a screenshot? It sounds like you tried Unity a bit and gave up after a little while or something because you can get amazing results if you know what you’re doing.
You can get really good lighting and set a really strong tone even in Unity free using nothing but regular lights and cookies, not to mention the fact that you can do lightmapping in external packages like say Vray (not always the most practical solution but the results are jaw dropping). Most games today mainly rely on lightmapping anyways since it looks better and is more efficient.
Even back in the days of Unity 2.5-2.6 you could get really great results, as far as I know the only thing that has really changed as far as lighting since then is the presence of the beast lightmapper and deferred rendering (Unity pro only, lets you have lots of lights on screen).