Module 5 Devlog - Lighting and Shader Graph

After implementing basic gameplay, the next objective was to make the scene more atmospheric and graphically impressive using lighting and shader graphs.  Following a lighting tutorial by Brackeys, I added light-emitting materials to some panels and then "baked" this lighting information into the scene.  Baking is a process of creating a map of lighting for objects in the scene which are static - aka unmoving, which reduces the amount of lighting that has to be calculated while the game is running.

My completed scene with baked orange and blue lighting

I then followed this hologram shader tutorial, also by Brackeys, to learn the basics of Unity's shader graph, a tool which allows you to connect nodes to create special effects for materials.  In this case, I learned how to apply an animated holographic effect to the model in the scene.

The scene with the addition of the holographic shader (and GIF compressed lighting)

Next, it was time to apply these concepts to develop effects for my Antarctic scene.  I wanted to completely transform the scene, using this nighttime photo of Antarctica as a reference:

Firstly, I needed to change the scene from day to night.  I replaced the skybox for the scene with Geoff Dallimore's Star Skybox, and added different lighting to better suit the night.  Here's a before and after comparison:

Before making lighting changes

After making lighting changes

When lighting the scene, I initially reduced the brightness of the primary directional light to make everything darker.  I then made a cylinder with a light-emitting  material and added a few to the huts to light them with a warm contrasting glow.  After this, there were still some key objects like the Mawson's Hut and penguin that were in darkness, so I added some patches of moonlight to make these things stand out in the scene.

The final thing to add was the Aurora Australis, or southern lights, which could be made using Unity's shader graph.  With the aid of Gabriel Aguiar's Aurora and Vertex Animation tutorials I made a customizable animated aurora effect, and added it to a subdivided rectangular plane.  I created a few variations of this shader material and arranged them in the scene to resemble the reference image:

The completed nighttime scene with the Aurora Australis shader effect