Game Developer August Håkansson, who previously demonstrated shader magic he created for his current project Beyond The Plastic Wall, featuring some innovative visual rendering techniques to create a unique look, has now unveiled how to handle lighting using a standard sprite shader. As he explained, for static lights and objects, it’s essentially a helper script that sets the correct properties in the editor and saves them. For dynamic lights, there’s a script that updates whenever the light changes.
As August admitted, this post was mostly just a joke, getting soft penumbra shadows with a smooth falloff is pretty challenging without relying on GI.
Another developer who shared his light-faking techniques is Jussi Kemppainen, Principal VFX Artist at Remedy and solo developer of the vehicle combat game Drivers of the Apocalypse.
As he explained, the shadows at the beginning of this video are created using simple line renderers, with the line traced from the sole of the foot for the start and from the knee for the end. The latter part of the video focuses on screen space point lights and spotlights based on buffer data. The point lights’ counterpoints are generated by a particle system, while the spotlights are represented by a camera-facing quad mesh.
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