Time to reflect of the hard path to setting up lighting for the project. I started with Blender, where I set the lights and was going to import them together with the model. I was aware that it’s possible to do, so I decided that Blender tools were more comfortable for lighting as well than in Unity. I also looked at some tips from BlenderGuru, whose tutorials helped me start with Blender and donut modelling.
I liked the result and confidently imported it to Unity, hoping to get the same lighting result. But it all went wrong. I got horribly looking lightmaps, and each time I got a different result.
It started off as just pure light or pure shadows, which might be useful in some particular case, but totally ruined my idea. I tried adjusting light settings and every time the lightmap was rejenerated, which took about 15 minutes each time.
I was altering the settings dozens of times, reimported the prefab and changed its settings, cleared lightmap data and regenerated again which took time to wait, and nothing worked. I was guided with several tutorials, with this one as the base:
This one helped a great deal to make much better settings, but didn’t solve the lighting problem. I rewatched it, rewatched several more basic tutorials while altering the parameters here and there and again regenerating the map. Nothing worked either. Then I tried unpacking the prefab and taking out lights from it, which produced a little bit better result, that was still useless. (I didn’t even document it, so frustrated with the situatuon I was)
Fail with implementing lighting meant the whole concept of the FMP had to be changed and changed quickly. I decided to leave the problem at the back of my mind for now and think, how the game implementation can be changed.
To switch the game to 2D I had two options in mind ,whith the second one trying to make it a false 3D. The positive side is that player could still explore the area, but the experience won’t be full as they won’t be able to fully control the way they look around and orientate. It will be me, who will define angles or areas that the player will see. Which also a bit ruins the whole idea, but at least it is something.
I decided to take a final attempt to fix the lighting and unexpectedly made huge progress. It turned out that Unity doesn’t work with imported lighting correctly. Though I didn’t like the idea to recreate the already set up lighting from scratch, but when I substituted Blender lights with Unity ones and it actually worked! The lightmap generated pretty well with all the key lighting I needed looking very close to what’s expected.
That means I continue to work with the original idea and since technical part is resolved for now, I need to do some thorough planning on the lighting and what I want the player to do, where to guide and for what purpose. Because while I was setting up the main lights I came to conclusion that I’m not sure where I want to guide the player, so the guidance can be confusing for now. But I plan to implement some simple puzzles like find and trigger to get to another location. Here’s how the area looks now: