Summary
The level we took over from the previous chapter looked complete, and yet uninteresting. To give it more life, we introduced a few instruments in this chapter.
First, we introduced two types of light nodes, OmniLight and SpotLight, to simulate candles, sconces, and the sun’s effect in the cave. While accomplishing this, you also saw the reason why creating a scene for a model might be useful, as well as necessary, compared to instancing the models directly in the level. This effort was followed by adding a small script that can help you switch the lights if needed. We’ll utilize this functionality later in this book.
Though lights were an obvious tool for improving the visuals, we also investigated shadows. They are resource-intensive, so you may want to turn them on for the lights that will have an important impact on your scenes.
To truly appreciate the effect of lights and shadows, we applied a bunch of environment settings. Although this helped the...