Week 5 – Day 2 -“Cornel Box”

Date: 2/1/16

We started out the day by exploring a Cornel Box, including creating a lightmap in Maya, and playing around with a variety of different features in Unity. Light maps seem to be different to UVs in that in a lightmap, the textures cannot overlap, but proportions dont matter as much, so you can sort of stretch the UVs a little. Simon recommended giving the lightmaps as much padding between the UVs as possible, to prevent light bleed.

Alternatively, instead of creating lightmaps in Maya we learned how to create them in Unity.

Inside the Cornel Box we created, we learned how to bake the diferent types of lighting into our scenes. Basically, when baking lighting the objects should be static. To introduce dynamic objects, we had to insert a light-probe, as well as change out light from baked to mixed. We learned how to introduce reflections, using the reflection probe, and how to subtaly trasmit the colour from the surrounding walls onto the dynamic object. The result of all of these effects can be seen in the video below.

We then went on to look at creating emmissive lighting, which kind of act like an area light, but can obviously be strange shapes, which may come in useful.

Today wasnt very relevant to my project, because all of my objects will probably be static, but it is definitely something an artist should know, and something I hope to explore a bit farther.

Then I went back to my project. I was having a few errors with tiling appearing where my objects met, so I asked Simon, and we figured out that my texture wasnt extending right up to the edge of the UV set, so there was a white line visible. So I went in and fixed this.

I then went on to UV and texture the bedside locker that I modelled a while ago. The UVing  was pretty straightforeward, but when it comes to texturing I am experiencing a little issue that I will have to ask Simon about tomorrow. Basically, when introducing a metal map, for some reason the reflection on my metal material is turning out very very dark. I checked the alpha channel, as well as the metalness channel and I cant figure it out, so I will need to ask in the morning.

I also fixed the normal map of my wallpaper, as it was a it too agressive, and not very realistic. Instead of using the texture I used a canvas texture from Textures.com to give the wallpaper a more realistic apearence

Summary:

We learned about lighting and reflection in Unity using a Cornel Box, and how and when to bake lighting into our scene. Short answer, when creating a mobile game, bake as much lighting as possible. The results are surprisingly good with baked lighting.