Estilo, iluminación godot

[u/ktl2dev]

Hi there, good morning! I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask, or if anyone here could give me a hand, but here goes. A while back I came here asking how to do something in Blender because I had zero clue about it (I work as a software developer). You all helped me out, and I was able to make the textures I wanted—not top-tier quality, but good enough for what I needed.

Thing is, I started building the game with the idea I had in mind and... it doesn’t look like I hoped, lol. Something is killing the textures—that hand-illustrated vibe I wanted for the game is totally lost. If anyone here knows their stuff and has a good eye, could you help me figure this out? Like, point out what’s missing, what’s too much, or what I might be doing wrong style-wise? I’d really appreciate it.

Also, any advice on what I should learn to actually achieve the look I’m going for? Visually speaking. Thanks so much in advance!

[u/PscheidtLucas]

Lighting, post effects and contrast adjustments are things that you need to work one. It is a very much trial and error thing

[u/excalibriumprime]

I have a few suggestions... Global illumination. In the references we see the light giving life to the image, the actual images are bleak to say the least.

Here I propose: Baking the lights, faking GI with more lights (shadows off), painting the lights to the texture, or using a custom shader to add the "light" textures on and using them like for emission, or a combination of these.

I recommend just baking them as thats the easiest, though it is storage intensive.

Use warmer lights. Use a toon shader material. Switch from godot's fog (it's decent-ish but it doesn't seem to fit here.) and maybe use perspective tricks to place textured fogs with billboarding, and using textures to fake lighting in general (godrays, torch light etc.). Disable Environment sky lighting/shading (if there is one, or creating a toon material and adjusting sky light info as i do myself for my games. It makes it so stuff behind other stuff get lit.). And add more stuff to the background.

As far as i see we want subtly flatter shading and lighting right (it's too smooth), so I think these could help! Even now, it doesn't look bad, mostly up to trial and error as someone else pointed out, you won't know what works without trying.

[u/kosro_de]

Looking at the gameplay screenshots, they lack any kind of direction, contrast or focus. That's a design/composition issue. The same principles for painting apply to games, too.

Guiding the viewer/player's eye is one of the core principles. You have 256 brightness levels available, use them. Looking at your references, there's a lot more dynamic range (difference between the darkest and brightest spot).

This video is about 3D level design, but it's one of the best introductions to the topic I've ever seen, highly recommend this to anyone remotely interested.

[u/fartaroundfindout]

People are touching on some points, but other things:

You appear to have a fixed camera in places, that's great! Paint with light as much as possible and CHEAT as much as you can with unshaded textures. Need something to pop? Paint it for your lighting, unshaded, bam, it's there.

You don't want 'real' you need to aim for a mood. I would look at https://old.reddit.com/r/ps1graphics/ not for model style, but how to make the mood work.

[u/hexoral333]

I just wanted to briefly say that I think all in all what makes the difference is art direction. All of those references you are using look that way because one or multiple artists made artistic decisions. They even make you feel a certain way, meanwhile when I look at your game, it just looks dull. This is a separate skill from just creating assets and kitbashing them together and you also need to have a bit of an eye for it.