🦆 Issue Fixed! (Kinda) 🦆 (Patreon)

Yo! Here's the follow up post I promised yesterday. I (kinda) fixed the issue I was having, but I'll most likely end up reworking the entire map at some point in the future. For now, I've decided to just go ahead and use a band-aid fix that'll make rendering a bit more tedious, but will let me avoid remaking the whole map which would take an even longer amount of time.

Overall I'm kinda thankful this has popped it's ugly head this early as it's put into perspective for me just how much I need to work on my indoor lighting, so I'll be putting in a lot more practice to get it right before Episode 2's release in the future.

That's pretty much it for now. I feel the need to explain the issue a little more down below if you're interested in lighting information, otherwise that's the end of todays update!

So, here's a quick breakdown of the issue I was having. The above render looks pretty decent lighting wise, however the hair looks... weird, since there are virtually no shadows. This is because the inside of the adventurers guild is a completely closed off building with no way of letting in a natural lighting setup from the outside.

Now, this usually wouldn't be an issue. The blacksmith scene for example used pretty much the same setup; a completely enclosed building with no way of allowing a natural lighting setup through the windows. The reason why this wasn't an issue though was because of the size of the space.

Smaller space sizes let you have point light/spot light setups without them looking weird. You cant really do this with large spaces since point-light shadows are extremely low resolution so they're not ideal for lighting up a large area.

This is the fixed render using my little band-aid solution. The comparison between the two feels night and day to me. There's a lot more detailed shadowing compared to the previous render and that's without making any shader tweaks.

Now, the band-aid fix is only temporary until I put in a lot more indoor lighting practice to figure out how I want to light my indoor scenes in the future. The next update won't have a lot of indoor scenes so I'm happy enough to use this fix for now to avoid delaying the update while I fix the scene map.

So yea, that's basically it. Lighting can be a pain sometimes, and now I know I need more indoor lighting practice. I don't know how to end this update post now, so er... here's a duck 🦆.