I’m trying to figure out how to best handle the lighting for a TopDown 3D ARPG and am struggling with getting the ambient lighting right. My biggest hurdle is my game has procedurally generated levels so I can’t just bake in the lighting so am looking for a dynamic lighting solution. The look I’m after is the following games.
I don’t want the top of the walls light up, but just the inside of the dungeon with ambient lighting, which was a problem anytime I used direction lightning or sky lighting. As the dungeon size can change based off how it’s generated it’d be difficult to fill rooms with post processing boxes or rect lights. Is my only solution to spawn a bunch of point lights?
Any suggestions? I can’t seam to get the lighting to stop affecting outside of the dungeon. I want the outer walls and the top of the walls to remain unlit. Example below.
Looks like putting a point light on the actor and letting them be the ambient light source is my solution given my levels are dynamically generated, but this presents another issue. If my light source doesn’t cast shadows the light bleeds through the walls.
That’s what the material that I put before is for, to put it on the outside parts of the wall and on the upper part, or you can put it as a mask in the texture of the material.
Probably best way would be to bake out separate maps (albedo, shadow pass, maybe slight GI) and mix them together in the level material. Then you could fade out the shadow map depending on a parameter (get world position of an torch in world space and use a dither node to fade out the shadow mask pass).
This would require you to render out the separate passes in a 3d program though. Perhaps unreal has a plugin that could do something similar, but blender, max or maya are your best tools for the task.
Not having much luck. I didn’t create the art assets so I’m not sure how to add extra materials on 1 specific side to accomplish this. There has got to be a way to have the light just stop at a specific height or something.
A spot light attached to the player with shadows turned on seams to work well. Originally was using a point light, which caused really long shadows when turning on shadow casting that I did not want.
I’d like the shadows to always go in 1 direction though instead of moving around with me. Basically like having a directional light except cutting off at the walls.
Checking POE it looks like spotlight is exactly the way to go and the shadows casting from me is actually accurate. Below shows the shadows moving from a light source on the player.
I can get similar results with a point light, but then I lose the ability to cut the light off at a specific height as I don’t want the very top of the giant doors and walls to be very visible.
Character lighting is done with 4 point lights to even the light across the entire character and a 5th light will be added to control the characters shadow as the light above the player just nearly creates a blob shadow.
Below is what the top of a wall looks like as well giving the desired results.
