Dash - Cinematic Lighting and Pipeline Creation

While I was working for Decoy Games, I was responsible for creating the lighting pipeline for our in-game cinematics. At the time we had just switched from each shader into using a half Lambert shader for our characters. We were using this shot as a test to see what lighting could do with this half Lambert shader. This was also the time where we had enabled a shader-based rim lighting system, which also needed to be tested on this shot.

We first start off with darkening the background and then doing a tiny amount of post processing period the post processing here is very light it is mainly just to create the depth of field effect for the camera Because in Unity, camera depth of field is done through post processing not through the camera itself.

We then move over to reducing the shadow flicker period since our shader is a mix of a Toon shader and a Lambert shader there were times where we would get these shadow artifacts. So in this stage we would use some shader options and some light work arounds to get the shadows looking a little softer.

Next up is lighting and the rim shader examples. For the lighting of this scene it is an outdoor scene that is supposed to be pretty harsh in the oranges. For the rim light shader I created a few variants to see what would look best for this shot. After getting feedback from the founders, they wanted a complimentary color for the rim light to contrast against the color of the main lights. So I created a few versions of that to see what that might look like.

After that we had shadows, so a big thing with this half Lambert share is that we have the ability to half shadow self-cast on the object. So in the last example I created a before and after shadow pass on the shot. We ended up going with the shadow version for this shot, but going forward we thought it would be better to pick and choose which shots got shadows based on how they were looking with them.