Small Lighting Tutorial (Patreon)

Hi,

here is a short pretty basic "how to" adjust the lighting in my scenes and also most other scenes.

I am not a lighting pro myself and for sure don't know all the tricks there are, but nevertheless I learned some stuff from experimenting, which I want to share with you.

In PART 1 I describe what I use and how I make the lighting in general. Some of you might find it useful and also some of you might have tips for me what I can make better.

PART 2 will be a sum up how to increase or decrease lighting intensity in "Virtual Sweetheart ReLoaded". So skip to it if you just interested in this one.

PART 1

The tools/lights I use

Colorcorrect/Tonemap

- First of all I am a big fan of the colorcorrect/tonemap asset made by driver505. It makes the colors and lighting more vibrant, so I add it to basicaly everything. Here is a direct comparison with it on and off: https://imgur.com/uxk2F11 

In the scene you can find it here attached to the CUA-Atom https://imgur.com/lYx6S3F 

Two point lighting

- I also like to use two point lighting, so I only try to spawn 2 invisible light sources on all occasions. Most of the time when I tried to utilize 3 light sources, it killed the nice looking shadows (especially on hairs) and also makes volumetric effect look worse. Here is a video comparison: https://imgur.com/Sf6toGy 

In the scene the 2 light sources can be found here (red squares) https://imgur.com/JePxSsg 

They are attached to animation patterns (yellow squares and lines) to change position, so the dudes shadow does not block the view on the sexing parts.

Scene Lighting

- The last instance of lighting I use is the "Scene Lighting" menu. (This is how you can access it in VaM: https://imgur.com/WGdZJQM )

The "Global Illumination" options https://imgur.com/Rts5rAw affect how the skyboxes interact/illuminate all internal VaM objects. They don't do nothing to the Custom Unity Assets like the environment. 

I don't do much to these options other then set "Master Intensity" somewhere between 0.00 and 0.10 and check how it looks like with different skyboxes https://imgur.com/cfkGluv 

Usually I also leave the "Diffuse Intensity" at 1.00. In this scene I turned it completely down, because I liked the "SkyCyber1" skybox for the view outside the window, but did not like how it changes the skin to yellowish/greenish color like in this clip: https://imgur.com/7Nzqjpy 

"Camera Exposure" slider regulates the lighting intensity of spawned "Invisible lights" to VaM objects. It does not affect the Custom Unity Assets (environment in this scene) aswell like you can see in this clip https://imgur.com/R7C5GCS 

Usually I leave it at 1.00. In this scene I reduced it, because I wanted to increase the lighting intensity and range of spawned invisible lights to illuminate the Custom Unity Asset environment more. So I had to reduce the Camera Exposure to balance the illumination on the Girl and other VaM objects https://imgur.com/8U2PrPR 

The last section of "Scene Lighting" menu is "Unity Ambient Lighting" https://imgur.com/YKuCbVr 

This part is very usefull to increase the lighting intensity (and also change color) to Custom Unity Assets like environment, without doing anything to VaM objects. Here is a little video demonstration of it: https://imgur.com/mn8JGvz 

I use this section pretty often to balance the overall lighting.

PART 2

The SumUp

So basically you will need to play with 2 "Invisible lights" over here https://imgur.com/JePxSsg (They are a little bit clunky to click on, because of animation pattern, so another way to access them is through "select" menu. They are called "LightFrontLeft" and "LightFrontRight" https://imgur.com/zOsO0Hh )

and Unity Ambient Lighting & Camera Exposure in Scene Lighting menu https://imgur.com/AWreoNH 

To increase the illumination in the scene just increase the Intensity and/or Range of the Invisible Lights and reduce the camera exposure like in this clip: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/seashelldefiantafricanporcupine 

To reduce the lighting and make the scene darker you will also need to play around with unity ambient lighting like in this clip: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/flimsyovercookedarcticwolf 

After you found your fav lighting don't forget to save the scene!

This is it. I hope this tutorial helps at least some of you. Don't change too much though, cause I want to release meaty update with lots of new dynamic position changes in about a week at latest :)