Just starting out in 3D, trying to get a feel for lighting especially. I see so many nice effects but no idea why they look so good.
I’ve been researching some myself.
I think the links at the bottom of this page have been valuable.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/07/17/the-freedom-to-create-your-own-kind-of-beautiful/
This has also been good reading -
Coupled with good working knowledge of the standard shader intricacies I think most creatives can get pretty good results.
Perhaps start with http://www.creativeshrimp.com/ …Then play with Blender Cycles, Daz3D IRay and UE4 and Unity3D.
So far I learn all current knowledge from:
- Working experience (Especially big company. Even they use in-house engine but the theory is same.)
- Read tons of articles (Unity official / Polycount / Someone or company’s development blog)
- Unity example (Open, research and break it down into parts and try to re-make them in new project.)
- This forum (Able to learn something from professional like @theANMATOR2b and @bgolus )
- Failure (Retry. Never give up and fight until you reached the goal.)
It also helps to know these facts ahead of time:
- Mixed mode lighting doesnt work. IT may never be implemented for point or spot lights, only directional lights.
So you need to know if you want to use baked lighting or not. - Point light biases dont work for realtime lights in Unity 5.2.3. I don’t know if this is fixed in Unity 5.3 or not.
Does anyone else know any important things that people starting out should know about lighting?
I did have this weird situation where there was the main directional light (aka “The Sun”) and it was casting shadows on a building… and then on the inside of the building I put an area light, and it was like it wasn’t working… turned out, it was unable to light the area that the shadow was falling upon, because light would spill outside onto the ground and light it.
I have done a lot of just messing around with stuff, rather enjoyable actually. I think I was just confused in general because all of the “maps”. UV, Normal, Diffuse, Specular, Occlusion… none of it made ANY sense to me. I found a program called CrazyBump that was free to use, and I was able to get some neat looking stuff that way.
I’m getting why this is considered an art form, but it’s quickly becoming fun for me. I just don’t know what to learn next.
I’m sure it will take me a while to figure out the tricks to get textures to place nice with the models and all that. All in due time.