Directional Lights and Low Poly objects just don’t seem to play well together:
(Apologies for the cars. They are poly-reducded standins until I get my hero-cars modeled.)
Adding fill light by bumping up the ambient to insane levels takes the curse off it, but doesn’t really solve the problem:
As you can see, this is a very Low-Poly object:
… but the directional light is lighting entire triangles rather than acting as a pixel light.
The texel density is not that horrible:
Is there anyway around this? Other than bumping up the poly count? I’m daunted by trying to figure out an effective way to replace a directional light source with point or spot lights and get proper shadows and a sun-lit feel.
It seems that there has to be a way to do this… I can’t see why simple geometry can’t be well lit.
[edit]
But - it’s the “self shadowing” that’s really the issue.
If you look at the shadow cast by the Covered Bridge (not seen in situ! where’s the river?), it’s fine. And the shadows of the trees, they are ok, and you can see that the road tiles and base geometry are low-poly:
But the lighting on the Covered Bridge itself, it’s not lighting/self shadowing correctly.
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