The Bake and Wait Cycle
We decided to use baked GI (Global Illumination), but this doesn't come set up with good defaults, and the unity manual on the subject was quite disapointing. Learning how to do anything lighting based has been quite time consuming, and its a lot to try to apply at once. This whole project has been an extremely long cycle of tweak -> bake -> wait 10mins -> repeat as I got to know what settings change what.
Work done
I have placed, setup, tweaked and re-tweaked every light and emissive material in the game, as well as the scene based lighting settings. It took a lot of time, even more so due to a colour vision deficiency, but the results over real-time GI are worth it.
PBR and Substance
With all the work on lighting it was important to get materals looking like they should, with the help of Substance Painter I introduced my team to a PBR workflow. Substance painter allows you to paint and export all the relevant texture maps (Albedo, Metallic(+smoothness), AO, Emission, Normal, Height) and as I had some experience with the application, I scheduled and taught a few sessions on it's basic usage and how to export/import to unity and set up materials. It ended up really helping the aesthetic of the game.
Modeling
Most of the early prototype modeling was done in engine with the help of Unity ProBuilder, its a modeling tool built right into the engine. Using this myself and Jack iterated over out prototypes that our artists could then take and work on.
Outside of the engine I used Blender to create some small assets as environmental filler. The bricks in the image below are an example of an asset that I modelled in blender and textured using Substance Painter.
The result
Baked lighting allowed the use of many more light sources and gave the game a much richer environmental ambience as well as better performance and more control over localised light sources.
Teaching
As I mentioned earlier, I spent several hours teaching my team to use substance painter and introducing them to the workflow.
I also set up and taught a 3hr class on "ProBuilder"/"ProGrids", "Cinemachine" and the "Post Processing Stack" assets from the unity catalogue.
I gave a short introductory presentation that can be found on github here, and then did a practical session. The session was structured to make the most use out of all the tools. An initial introduction to probuilder/grids was followed by a guided "build a level" excercise. The levels that each student produced were then then used to setup and demo each of the camera types. Finally, some post processing was added to give this a final touch. I provided materials that I'd prepared in advance, (which can be found in the link on slide 1) and each of the example scenes provided is the start/end point of a task/topic.
While the turnout was low, the feedback was great, and I've noticed good usage of these assets in 3 group projects so far. Standing up and teaching was not the easiest thing, but I learned a lot and enjoyed it. It was definitely a worthwhile experience that I'd love to be able to repeat.