Lightmapping - How to render a nice Snowscene with Beast...?

Unity Engine
1

hello!
i was playing around with unitys beast lightmapping for some time now but this one troubles me.
when i try to render a neat snowy outdoor scene either with view bounces the shading is too rich in contrast (hill-parts that are not right in the sunlight become too dark) or with many bounces my shadows (thrown by trees, houses, and so on) are not dark enough.
my workaround for now is to render the poor contrasted shading first and the bare shadows in a second lightmap. afterwards i photoshop those two images together. the results are not perfect though, because i have light-bleeding issues when rendering the shadows without shading.
well, is there a more elegant way to do this? maybe someone could share his/here experience…? :slight_smile:

2

Hello,

For a snow level I also wanted to use the lightmapping feature, I wanted nice soft shadows with reduced noise, so, I messed around with the Shadow Radius and Shadow Samples and managed to achieve a nice feel for my scene.

Alternatively, you can try customising Beasts lightmap settings and see if you get the look and feel you want from that, docs here: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/LightmappingCustomSettings.html

It’ll be interesting to see a screenshot of your work in progress, it will help when trying to suggest what you could try.

Thanks,
Chris

3

hello chris, thanks for answering. :slight_smile:

well that’s exactly the point, i have no problem creating light soft shadows, but what i want is more real looking snow-hills. i want to have dark shadows but still a lot of skylight to shade the hillsides. snow is white, so i don’t want the hill-parts that are not directly in the sunlight to be shaded so dark. this is what i am aiming for: low-contrast hill-shading between soft light blue and white and at the same time dark blue, hard shadows.

2360×3540 1.46 MB

1600×1200 387 KB

i know, in real life the snow surface (many small crystals) as well as our subjective eye sight do the trick. standing on top of a snow hill with the sun right behind you, the sun meets the snow at a very low angle, but still the snow looks really white! so what can i do to mimic that shading without at the same time loosing darker shadows from the trees?

4

For that level of control, try editing the lightmaps in Photoshop or similar software.

Thanks,
Chris