Although I’ve really only been sharing bright and shiny screenshots of our game, it actually progresses from a sunny farm through to a dark and creepy forest. Naturally, this meant it was time to focus on implementing a coherent lighting model for the level. At the moment we’re working with ambient lighting, two directional lights and two spot lights per short section of our game.

In addition, I’ve been looking at methods for shadowing and shading. Each bee is an intricate model, but scaled down it would be easy to lose a lot of the detail. As you can hopefully see in the following images, shading adds some depth and makes the bees appear far more three dimensional.

Shade by distance from ground.

Shade when normals point down.

Combined Shading Techniques.

Combined With Lighting.

 
 Similar techniques applied across the entire scene also improves the overall appearance, with and without lighting:

 
 Finally, here’s an additional happier version of the shot above, just to show the difference a change in lighting can make: