Throughout the development of Unity 5, we’ve used our Viking Village project internally as a testing ground for shading and lighting workflows.

If you’re using the Unity 5 beta, you can download the Viking Village package from the Asset Store to get insights into how you can assemble and illuminate a scene in Unity 5. We also present some of our learnings below.

Creating a template environment

In order to ensure that your texturing and shader configuration is behaving appropriately, we recommend that you use a simple scene with a variety of lighting setups. This could mean differing skyboxes, lights etc – anything that contributes to illuminating your model.

When you open Unity 5, you’ll notice that any new empty scene has a procedural sky as well as default ambient and reflection settings. This provides a suitable starting point.

For our template environment we used:

HDR camera rendering

A few scattered reflection probes (for localized reflections on objects)

A group of light-probes

A set of HDR sky-textures and materials, as well as procedural skies. The sky which ships with this project was custom-made for Unity by Bob Groothuis, author of Dutch Skies 360.

Off-white directional lights with matched intensity and HDR sky color

Adjusting sky texture panoramas

Most sky textures include the sun (along with flares etc.), thus, light from the sun gets reflected by surfaces. This has the potential to cause three issues:

1) The Directional light you use to represent the sun must match the exact direction of the sun painted onto the skybox or there will be multiple specular hotspots on the material.

2) The reflected sun and the specular hotspot overlap, causing intense specular highlights.

3) The baked-in sun reflection is not occluded when the surface is in shadow and it becomes overly shiny in darkness.

The sun is erased from the sky texture and re-added using a directional light and a lens flare.

As a result, the sun highlight, flares, sunrays and HDR values need to be edited out of the sky texture and reapplied using Directional Lights.

Authoring physically-based shading materials

To avoid the guesswork involved in emulating real world materials, it is useful to follow a reliable known reference.The Standard Shader supports both a Specular Color and a Metallic workflow. They both define the color of the reflections leaving the surface. In the Specular workflow, color is specified directly, whilst in the Metallic workflow, the color is derived from a combination of the diffuse color and the metallic value set in the Standard Shader controls

For the Viking Village project, we used the Standard Shader’s Specular Color Workflow. Our calibration scene, which you can download from the Asset Store, includes some handy calibration charts. We referenced the charts regularly when designing our materials.

When approaching materials you can choose between what we call the Specular and the Metallic workflows, each with its own set of values and a reference chart. In the Specular workflow you choose the color of the specularly reflected light directly, in the metallic workflow you choose if the material behaves like a metal when it is illuminated.

The specular value chart:

The metallic value chart:

Choosing between Specular or Metallic workflows is largely a matter of personal preference, you can usually get the same result whichever workflow you choose to use.

Aside from charts and values, gathering samples of real world surfaces is highly valuable. It is of great help to find the surface type you are trying to imitate and try to get an understanding of how it reacts to light.

Setting up the material

When starting out, it’s often useful to create a plain but tweakable representation of the materials using colors, values and sliders derived from the calibration charts. Then, you can apply textures while keeping the original material as a reference to confirm that characteristics are preserved.

Top row: untextured. Bottom row: textured. Left to right: Rock, Wood, Bone, Metal.

The traditional approach to creating textures

Textures in the Viking Village have been authored using both manual-traditional methods (photos + tweaking) as well as through scanned Diffuse/albedo, specular-, gloss and normal map images which were provided to us by Quixel.

Be careful when adding detail in the texture channels of the material. For example, it usually pays to avoid placing lighting (Ambient Occlusion, shadows etc.) in your textures: remember that the physically based rendering approach provides all the lighting you should need.

Naturally, retouching photographs is more demanding than using scanned data, specially when it comes to PBS-friendly values. There are tools that provide assistance to make the process easier, such as Quixel Suite and Allegorithmic Substance Painter.

Scanned data

PBS-calibrated scanned textures alleviate the need for editing, since data is already separated into channels and contains values for albedo, specular and smoothness. It is best if the software that provides the PBS-calibrated data contains a Unity profile for export. You can always use the reference charts as a sanity check and as a guide if you need to calibrate the values using Photoshop or a related tool.

Material examples

The Viking Village Scene features a large amount of content while trying to stay within reasonable texture memory consumption. Let’s take a look at how we set up a 10-meter-high wooden crane as an example.

Notice that many textures, especially specular and diffuse textures, are homogenous and require different resolutions.

Example1: This Crane object has 2 materials: 2 diffuse, 1 specular-smoothness, 2 occlusion and 2 detailed textures.



Example 2: The shield prop has 1 material: 1 diffuse, 1 specular-smoothness, 1 occlusion and no detailed textures.

On the left: Crane Inspector for both materials. Rightmost is the shield prop material.

Albedo texture: In the specular workflow it represents the color of diffuse light bounced off the surface. It does not necessarily need to be highly detailed as seen in the left image (crane), whereas the right texture (shield) includes significant unique detail.

Painted Crane Diffuse Map snippet with plain wooden color and intensity. Contains a modest amount of detail. Right image: Shield Diffuse texture with higher (ppi) unique detail.

Diffuse value (no texture) for crane material

Specular: Non-metals (insulators) are comparatively dark and in grayscale while metal values are bright and could be colored (remember that rust, oil and dirt on a metal are not metallic). Specular for the wood surface did not benefit extensively from a specular texture, so a value was used instead of inputting a map.

Crane Specular values for wood.

Crane Specular map for metal (not using metallic shader). Right: Shield Specular texture.

Smoothness is a key element in PBS materials. It contributes variation, imperfections and detail to surfaces and helps represent their state and age.

For the crane, smoothness happened to be fairly constant across the surface and was therefore substituted by a value. This delivered a reasonable texture memory gain.

Crane Smoothness values for wood. No textures required!

Crane Smoothness map for metal (not using metallic shader). Right: Shield Smoothness map with mixed metal and wood surfaces.

Occlusion indicates how exposed different points of the surface are to the light of the surrounding environment. Ambient Occlusion brings out surface detail and depth by muting ambient and reflection in areas with little indirect light.

Keep in mind that there’s also the option of using SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) in your scene. Using SSAO and AO could result in double darkening of certain areas, in which case you may want to consider treating the AO map as a cavity map.

An AO map that would emphasise deep cracks and creases may be the best option if the game uses SSAO and/or lightmapped Ambient Occlusion.

1 Lightmapped AO, 2: Occlusion texture, 3: Occlusion in Diffuse, 4: Image effect SSAO

Secondary Textures and resolution

Secondary Textures can be used to increase the level of detail or provide variation within the material. They can be masked using the Detail Mask property.

Due to the low resolution primary diffuse wood texture in the Crane example, the secondary texture set is crucial. It adds the fine detail to the final surface. In this instance, the detail-maps are tiled and at a reasonably low resolution. They are repeated on many other wooden surfaces, thus delivering a major texture memory saving.

Secondary albedo- and normal maps compensate for the low-resolution main diffuse and normal map. Both textures reduce overall texture memory by being widely “overlayed” and tiled on wooden surfaces throughout the village. Be cautious when providing lighting information to a diffuse detail map as it this has a similar effect to adding such information to primary diffuse.



Crane wooden surface with (left) and without (right) secondary texture maps.

These workflows certainly helped us when designing the Viking Village project. We hope you also find them useful, and look forward to reading your comments!

Acknowledgements

The Viking Village project was launched in partnership with the creative team at Quixel, developer of HDR surface capture technology and the Quixel Megascans library of PBS-ready textures.

Big thanks to the very talented Emmanuel “Manu” Tavares and Plamen “Paco” Tamnev for bringing this scene to life.

Go and download the project at the Asset Store. Be aware that it’s optimised for Unity 5.0.0 RC2.