Type 2 Prototype - Lighting and the pain in the butt that it is

So lighing for me has always been an issue, I try my hardest to work around it and learn it as best as I can to get the best lighting.  One issue I learnt from lighting is that you have edit the intensity and attenuation, the issue is to try and balance the amount of lighting with how much and where it will hit via walls and floor with fadeout.  If you overlap, it causes massive issues with the lighting and I have seen massive spikes in the FPS counter.

Lighting Only

After working with the lighting and got the settings to a decent point.  I noticed that not all the areas have lighting attached in it but when you look at the overall layout, it makes it look pretty.  Although I don't use this as much, it was recomended to me to see how intense the lighting is in the overall world, especially in the assets in the world.

Stationary Light Overlap

Stationary light is to show the overal level of lighting in the environment, the way it was described to me was in the relation to if it's green that it means that the area is covered with a decent amount of lighting, wether direct lighting or of seperate lighting that overlaps.  Obviously the darker the colour, the better or more lighting that is pointing in that area.

Lightmap Density 

Lightmap density confuses me still but as the models are mostly low poly, when i made them I didn't really think about how efficient and necessary it would be in the overall end product.

The way it was described to me is to show the lightmap density of objects that are texture mapped.  The color coding relates to the density being blue as bad to red which is bad and their relation to the ideal/max density.  I have been told that it is important to have even texel density across your scene to get consistent lightmap lighting.

This is something that i really need to go back and work on it as the density is still something that I obviously have massive issues with still.

Light Complexity

Although my light overlap presents that my lighting is covering everywhere at least to an acceptable level, I learnt that this still may not be the best looking at the complexity.

When looking at light complexity, the visions shows the number of non-static lights that will be affecting the assets with in geometry. The whole premise is to keep an eye out for lighting cost which is in regard to how much a surface is affected by the amount of light sources.  The more it is , the more costing it is.  This is an area looking back that I really need to go work on in future products as its clear that the shading is terrible in areas.

Final Image

Overall, with some areas needing work, the end result presents something that i like the look off, the mix of different lighting makes the environment very pretty.  Overall, i'm happy but its clear that you need a strong knowledge of lighting to be competent as it has presented overall issues in FPS in places which can be apparent in areas.  It's things that i need to think about in the future for sure.