Using some tools from the asset store I am trying to create a Holiday/Christmas Winter Scene. I have about 40 Point Lights (tiny Planes) that are Acting as Xmas Lights around the few buildings in the shot. I understand that this is not the most optimal way to pull this effect off. I’ve been scouring google & Unity forums for relative resources, but to no avail.
Using Deferred Lighting in the PRO version did help drastically.
Can anyone shed some light on best practices for achieving this effect? Would it better to approach this at texture, shader, or external software level (after effects)?
I’m sure someone knows an excellent way of doing this, but probably the typical graphics-budget-oriented approach would be to first look into using unlit shaders where possible, emissive shaders where you can get away with that, and then finally point lights as the most expensive but nicest looking effect.
Just a quick idea off of the top of my head (I didn’t test it):
Assuming you have 3 different light colors - make a shader that can switch the unlit parts of your mesh by a value. Say - you have red, yellow and green with the shader being able to switch between 0, 1 and 2.
Then you use 1 or 2 vertex lights per color with a large radius in the close range of the lights so that there is a diffuse light emitting into the scene but it’s not too taxing on the performance in case you need a lot screen at once.
Now you could switch the lights (or even the light color value) together with the shader light switch by script.
Another way would be to use light flares without an actual pixel light instead of an unlit custom shader. So you use a flare for the highlight visuals and the large vertex light for the actual diffuse brightness in the scene.
Why not just use an unlit-transparent flare/halo image and have it face the camera always if it doesn’t actually light anything up… No lights needed then.
Okay I got a few objects that have Halo Effects assigned to them. I also have included a Flare Effect. Now from what I read, I cannot access the Halo.Class in Unity. How would I go about changing colors and Flashing?
I am sure I can accomplish the flashing scripts, through enabling & disabling the gameObject; I am just curious if there is a way to access the Flare.Class at this level?
The Halo Effects applied are Static & on the Leftside Building: