Multiple Lights

The above example goes a long way to sorting out our issue of bedding in the characters, and in many scenes it might be that simple, however, we have a few more things to play with! We can have multiple 'Unlit Lights' (each with an independent tint colour, brightness and contrast) in a scene and depending on the character's position within a location it will determine how much 'influence' to take from each 'light'. This means we can darken the characters as they walk under objects or lighten them as they walk under a lamp or. Not only that but as we are dealing with tint colours we can avoid 'muddy' grey lighting, our dark areas can tint the character's rich midnight blue or whatever colour we choose!

Now this is in no way an accurate real-world lighting system, really, no way near, not even close. It is however an artistic one and allows us to take liberties to get the results we want AND work very quickly.

Dynamic Lights

We can also turn the 'Unlit Lights' on and off at real-time. The sytem will update the scenes lighting array and the lighting on the characters will update automatically. We've not used this in anger yet apart from when we switch scenes, but I imagine it will come in handy for exciting stuff like flashes of lighting, magical emerald witch-fire or the strobing lights of a German techno nightclub (the last example may not make it into the game).

Shadows & Shadow Tint

Shadows are really important to bed a character into a scene. The shadow is a connection between the character and the environment, showing you visually that the two parts are occupying the same space. A contact shadow helps you judge the characters spatial relationship with the world around them, when jumping for example it helps reinforce visually that the character has left the floor.

By default Unity's unlit shaders do not receive real-time shadows (makes sense, I'm sure by default most people don't want this functionality, but we did) . This was the first thing we added back into our custom unlit shaders.

Next we found that as our scenes can be quite bright and colourful we didn't want boring grey drab shadows. So we added the ability to colour the shadows any colour we liked! Again, this isn't accurate to the real world but we're not making a real-world game so we're good with taking control of the colours back...IN THE NAME OF ART!