Discussing about importance of ambient lighting techniques with our team. This screenshot is a perfect example how bad big shadowed areas look if you don't handle this problem in a good way.
The sun light (point light) is not the only light source outdoors. The sky light (big area light) is super important too. You need at least some level of approximation of sky light visibility to make the outdoor rendering look good.
The big problem in above scene is that normal maps vanish completely. The directional term is not strong enough. This makes the surfaces look flat. All the fancy per pixel lighting vanishes, because the normal vector dependent term vanishes in shadowed areas.
You can't also see any large scale sky occlusion under the trees. Seems that they simply don't have any. This makes it impossible to use a proper PBR/HDR skylight. It would make everything too bright. So they seem to use constant ambient instead, and it looks very flat.
Also you'd want bent normals or similar to make the ambient light directional component and occlusion more visible.
This image looks strange as there's only medium frequency AO (SSAO). High frequency and low frequency AO are missing completely.
We had exactly the same problem in large scale shadowed areas in our Xbox 360 games. Those games had fully real time lighting. It's not easy to make fully real time ambient lighting look good. But we have various ideas for improvements, which are cheap enough for low end mobiles.
And this is how much improvement just occluding the eyes makes (mod).
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.