Making Things Look better: Fill Lights

What’s the difference between this image:



And this one:

The first has just a single lamp: the sun (strength 1).
The second has three lamps: the sun (strength 0.8) a hemi pointing the same way as the sun (0.2) and a hemi facing upwards from below the vehicle (0.3). The two extra lamps provide ‘fill’ and keep the shaded side of the model from being completely black.

I quite often play with different hue fill lights. For example: make the sky fill light blue, the sun slightly yellow and the ground fill brown. Not much, but just enough to make the lighting less uniform. The difference is subtle:


Here’s another example.

Top: No Fill
Middle: Fill, but all white
Bottom: Fill with yellow tinted sun and blue tinted sky.






Note that the sun and sky colors were picked to add to white with an intensity of one. I have way overblown the saturation in the colored image of them to make it clear where each light is illuminating.

thanks for the tip, three lights can make a game slower but it still better results than one…

You can now use environment lighting in the world tab to do this :wink:

Edit: Forgot I was using UPBGE instead of regular BGE

remember to uncheck specular/glossy in the lamps that dont need it. sometimes i leave all of them on, and sometimes i turn it off in the hemi pointing downward.

in the upbge, and at the disproportional cost of processing power. 3 lamps are way faster.

Not really. The environment lighting either uses one color(solid color value added to the shader’s light value) or blend between 2 colors basing on normal direction(still a bit faster than having 2 hemis). So it’s not any slower. It’s only disadvantage is less control over it, but when you’re not intended to do very accurate artistic adjustments, than using that option is optimal.