From Light to Darkness (Noir Dairy)

The class began I joined the online class, Our tutor began explaining one of the core elements of visual art, "Lighting". He began giving use a brief about the rendering process modern computer uses to render images on the screen. First the GPU loads in vertex data, the it goes though the transformation process then it rasterizes the triangles formed by the three vertices passed into the GPU memory. the fragment section which comes next decides the color applied per each pixel. Then he moved on to explaining how PBR materials work and the main reason it looks realistic is due to the use of reflection maps affecting the surface of the object. He then began elaborating unity3d's standard shader in details. he explained the use and effect of lesser lower and there for used maps like height map which is the BW texture that raises or lowers the vertex which affects the height, Ambient Occlusion texture which simulates darkening in corners of object, Specular map which controls areas which can or cannot be shiny and finally the normal map with can add extra details to the object without the use of more polygons. After he focuses on teaching us the practical application and modes of implementation in the unity scene. he taught us about the lightmap settings and how to bake the scene properly so that we could get good quality lighting which could look convincing. for that he made a small sample scene and used area light(bake only), point lights, emissive material and light probe and baked the scene. the result were impressive.