Fake lighting on unlit materials

[Yrucoo]

Hello everyone!

Is it possible to make certain areas brighter without actually using a light source? I would like to only use materials which only use an ambientTexture and do not need lighting but, but still be able to adapt the color in some places to make them look brighter like in this image:

I know about the different light types, but don’t need full fledged lighting and would prefer faking it.

Is this something that could for example be done via postprocessing and/or a custom shader?

If not, does anyone have any tips how one could achieve an effect similar to the image above?

Any advice and hints for this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Patrick

[inteja]

Depending on the look you’re going for, you could try a number of techniques that don’t require real-time lights:

• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Screen Space Curvature post process e.g. "Cavity" shader effect like Blender 2.8 viewport for Babylon.js?
• Baked lighting:
  • Lightmaps
  • Baked vertex colours e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8hC-Cp1tJ0
• Gradient textures e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ITJgW9hVrE

No doubt others will have more suggestions too.

[Yrucoo]

Hello @inteja!

Thank you very much for the list, that sounds like some very good leads which I will look into ASAP.

Best regards,
Patrick

[roland]

Very, very much want to add deferred rendering, global illumination

There are technics to work with many lights ,like using a deferred renderer and ligth volumes. See “A large number of lights” in LearnOpenGL - Deferred Shading.

[Joe_Kerr]

Even faker (fakier, more fake…? Me fail English. Unpossible ) Babylon.js Playground

[roland]

@Joe_Kerr

Even faker

Level #999999!

[Yrucoo]

Hello @roland, hello @Joe_Kerr!

Thank you guys very much for the additional input! The even faker solution seems exactly like what I need.

Thanks again and best regards,
Patrick