How to get the Most Out of Unity Indie Version?

Hi,

I was wondering what can I do to give my games a polished look with the Indie version of Unity? Are there any specific techniques I can use? The Pro version comes with a lot of extras and camera effects so it's easier, but what can I do about the Indie version. There's no special camera effects or extras. My game looks flat, dull, and boring when I want it bright, vibrant, and polished.

If you guys know how I can do this that'd be great, I'm sure there's other who are wondering the same thing. Also if anyone knows of any custom shaders or camera effects that will work for the Indie version that'd be awesome.

Thanks, hope to get some answers

I've posted a screenshot so you can see what I mean, even after brightening the lighting it still doesn't looked polished, what am I missing? Are there better cartoony textures I can use to make it brighter?

 

You get custom shaders with indie. You can fake reflections in indie. Colors are not more suddenly more vibrant in pro. Render to texture support and resulting image effects are not required for a good looking game.

Find yourself an artist who knows what he's doing. That's all it takes.

 

Using LightMaps can do alot for your game I would think Its kinda hard to tell you what to do without know what the game looks like at its current state

 

Setting the lights of your scene properly will do a big part of the job.
Have a look at this: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Lights.html

 

What I find is that a white light and the default Ambient Light setting looks terrible. You should probably never have just one light in your scene.
I had a game working a few days ago that really looked great even though it mostly consisted of a ~200 poly model and a Terrain.

If you don't believe Unity Free can do good graphics, have a look at the 3D Platformer tutorial.

Edit: Oh, I see, you're past the noob point of using default lighting. Your scene actually looks very good to me, but I suppose if you want it to look better and give it more of a "pop", you should try lightmapping it. I don't actually know how to lightmap yet, but I hear it looks great

 

Shadows help out a ton when using lights, but that is a pro only feature...

 

While the standard assets that come with Unity for grass, shrubs and other ground level foliage are good I have found that using some custom textures of high quality can really make your scene POP.

Completely different genre, but check out Tiger Woods Onlinefor a good example.

 

Bake out lightmaps with global illumination and some shadows. It really makes everything stand out a little bit more ad gives you more control over the scene's lighting.

 

Thanks Iron Warrior I'm trying that right now and it's tough it isn't really working. Plus I have to go through and UV Unwrap in 3ds Max all my models over again because I didn't do that in the beginning. But I'll post some pics when I've made progress.

 

You don't actually have to unwrap any of the objects, you can just use Auto unwrap that's built into 3ds Max.

Here's a tutorial on how to do lightmapping in Max (dunno if you know how to or not)...just do "Use Automatic Unwrap" instead of an existing map channel, and make sure it's channel 2.

This is the tutorial that showed me how to get lightmaps into Unity, so if you have any questions just ask.

EDIT: Forgot to link the tutorial!

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=24665

 

Thanks I've already seen some tutorials and it still doesn't seem to work. When I lightmap the scene and import it back in. There are no shadows and everything is messed up. Plus my textures are all off and wrong. I don't know if using 3ds Max 2011 has anything to do with it. I heard that others have had problems with the 2011 versions. If you know what I'm doing wrong then let me know.

 

Are you exporting to fbx then into Unity or exporting the .max file directly? I find it's simpler to just save the .max file into the assets folder...might be what you're doing already.

Baking a lightmap shouldn't affect your textures unless you're using the wrong UV channel for your lightmaps/textures.

Make sure that your channel is set to 1 for your first UVW Unwrap and the channel on the Automatic unwrap is set to 2.

Try just importing the model with the texture first...if it works, bake out the lightmap with auto unwrap and see if Auto unwrap is the problem.

 

Check you texture settings as from those pictures it looks like several of the ground ones might just be using bilinear. Switch to trilinear and play around with anisotropic settings should make them much sharper.

As others have said lighting plays a massive part in making your environments look good, either dynamic or via lightmaps. If Inide doesn't come with dynamic shadows you really need to find a way to get lightmaps working, this will give so much more depth to your scenes.

I guess looking at those pictures there is a lack of contrast, no really strong points of light or colour, making it all look a bit flat. I don't just mean aspects like shadowing and unlit faces, but the overall tone.

For example take you screenshot into Photoshop, crop down to just the game image and look at the 'levels'. Try applying 'auto' levels and see the difference. Granted you end up losing some colour, but the resultant image has more punch as the full range of colour/intensity is being used. This might give you some ideas for changes to textures, materials, lighting etc.

Personally i'd also look at the edges between elements, for example the very straight/clean edge you have between the bridge like structure and the ground. I'd probably hide parts of that with foliage or stones, just something to break up the fact that it looks 'dropped' down onto the terrain. Similarly with the trees in the background with look a bit floaty. Even a blob shadow on the terrain would probably help there.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. All my textures were bilinear so I switch them to trilinear. I got the external lightmapping to work, but look at the screenshot that's the best I could do. It's weird because before it wasn't working at all, then I did nothing different like 6 hours later and then it worked. It looks bad though and the shadows are blurry and not sharp. Plus when I walk around the building some of the parts of the model are glitching they flash on and off and you can see the pillar parts(I marked it in the screenshot). Do you guy know what's wrong this is really frustrating.

Thanks

 

looks like turned edges.. check your geometry in max.. object properties > check backface cull > recheck model