Lighting – Forest

Description

This is a forest environment project designed to test the engine’s lighting and its interaction with the props and 3D assets that make up the scene in Unity. The focus is on utilizing the HD graphics rendering pipeline tools with high-polygon assets.

Technical Goals

• Using the High Definition Render Pipeline
• Using high-poly meshes
• Integrating SpeedTree with HDRP
• Achieving realistic-style graphics
• Achieving realistic lighting

Tools and Tech

• Unity
• Megascans
• SpeedTree

Conclusion

Unity’s HD graphics pipeline allows for improved lighting and a realistic graphic style thanks to improved environment effects such as Height Fog and micro-detailed shadows. The scene responds well to lighting changes, and the high-density meshes retain a high level of detail on camera.

Post-Mortem

This project helped me understand and practice how Unity’s HDRP and Megascans assets work; it also taught me how to manage the features this pipeline offers when pushing the graphical limits of a scene’s frame rate and performance.

In a next iteration, I would look to implement techniques such as visibility-based rendering and object occlusion based on the camera view, as well as improving mesh LODs to boost performance.