Lighting Study - Stream AFK Screen
A lighting study I did last afternoon, inspired by my need for an AFK-screen for my Livestreams. The scene if fully dynamically lit, running upwards of 60fps on a GTX1060.
In this specific case I overblew the volumetric fog intensity to emphasize the sunshafts, though this would not render almost any scene unplayable for games with shifting perspectives.
Shading was handled using medium-quality, small-scale SSAO, layered together with Distance Field Ambient Occlusion for large-scale AO. While a serious performance-hit, this AO layering provides a massive amount of depth, hard to provide through any other dynamic lighting methods.
Assets are a mix-and-match of various (rather heavily modified) marketplace assets. All materials, including the terrain material using distance-faded (optimized) Parallax Occlusion Mapping (chosen over tesselation due to it being better at high-frequency details), are nearly completely my work.
Sunrise shot, likely my personal favorite as a still due to the amazingly vibrant colors, though unusable for an actual game setting. Fog intensity was through the roof, which compensated for the strong skylight in maintaining some degree of contrast.
A shot around noon. A weaker skylight, along with weaker volumetric fog, creating a more contrasting result to increase the feeling of being in a forest. Likely most suitable for an average game.
A nighttime scene. For this scene I decided to go with Hollywood-esque colors and lighting, giving the moonlight a very intense blue tint, using lots of volumetrics, making the shadows very dark to boost contrast and add a sense of mystery to the scene.