Light & 3D - Objects looks like pasted in Photoshop instead of in game world.

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1

Godot Version

4.6.2_Stable, Forward + renderer

Question

Hi! We are currently working on a barista simulator and run into a problem settings our lighting. We have tried couple of things ourselves, but none has given us the results we wants, so I thought I will ask here.

On this screen below you can see bunch of items that are placed on a counter. Our issue is that those object look a little bit like floating/like they are not touching the surface. The same strange thing is with when the counter touches the floor - there is none to very small shadow over there.

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image1920Ă—1042 421 KB

Here is our WorldEnvironment settings

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image1059Ă—1004 61.1 KB

I have read that enabling SSAO should help fix this issue - but even after enabling it helps a little with counter-floor shadows, however does not really help with objects placed on the counters.

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image1920Ă—842 293 KB

Our models do not have AO enabled and we use a mix of baked LightmapGI + dynamic light (but mostly for lighting the objects, while they themselves do not cast the shadows further).

Any ideas/help will be much appreciated.

2

What’s your experience with tweaking the detail on ssao? Were there any settings that work for the objects at all? And can u show the ssil? If the objects are not going to be moved, you might consider baking in the AO. Or you can try the dirty trick of just coloring in the bottom part dark. Have you also checked that the objects are really level with the object beneath it.

3

AO is by default only visible in shadows, i.e. on parts of the objects that directional/positional lights can’t reach. Increase “Light Affect” if you want it to be visible on the lit side of the objects as well. You also might want to decrease the radius.

4

If the ambient occlusion settings don’t do the trick, pick the strongest nearest light source on your map and enable shadows on it. Light nodes default to not casting shadows, probably for performance reasons.

5

Thanks to you all for the answers and sorry for long time with no reply. We have played with SSAO, some shadows settings in Project settings and it looks better now.

To summarize there were couple of issues:

  • We spend some time tweaking AO - thanks @acolyte for suggesting that and @normalized for the tip wit Light Affect, after increasing that to 1.0 it started to look really good in our setting.
  • We also spend some time tweaking settings for OmniLights, putting them in difference place and finally - changing to dynamic mode. Seems like a stupid mistake to not do so from the start, but we thought that maybe we can do we just the Lightmap GI node. Thanks and @Guarapicci for pointing us out in that direction.

Also, because maybe someone will find that interesting - we increased the height of the room the player is in. It may not be super visible on the screenshots but the wooden cart which players is in had a really narrow window - not a lot of light came in through that. It was also a problem to place any lamps on the ceiling because user would hit those with the head. So we decided to rebuild the room, make it higher, then more light from outside came in, we could also place lamps in places that make more sense than before and finally the scene is looking. I guess the lesson learned from that is also to play with the level design a bit :smiley:

6

By the way, if you want those floating text bits always pointing to the camera, you can set Flags->Billboard to “Enabled” (presuming they are Label3D nodes)