3 Steps To Gorgeous Game Art (With NO Modeling Skills) - Live Workshop

where you are. Hey, today's going to be a fun live stream. What we're going to do is we're going to jump inside of Unity and I'm going to take a super simple gray box. Just cubes and spheres and a first-person character controller. And I want to show you guys three, no, let's change that. I'm actually going to change the title after this live stream. There's actually five There's five key ingredients to making the scene look beautiful. You can make it look absolutely beautiful
[snorts]
with no textures, no modeling, no nothing. And I'll admit I haven't even done this yet. I'm just kind of going off of my intuition. I'm kind of guessing here. Those five things Those five things are as follows. Okay? Scale. We're going to talk about scale. I'm going to show you how to use scale. Distribution. What? Asset distribution. How we distribute assets in a scene.

Color, lighting, post-processing, and hey, I'll also throw in bonus tip here. And we're just going to throw in some ambience.
[snorts]
To make a scene look absolutely gorgeous. And all it is, all it is is this ugly gray box. Okay, I'm going to show you how to make this gray box look absolutely beautiful. This is for those of you who are geniuses with 3D art. But it's also for those of you who aren't, who know nothing about 3D. Because the truth is is the people who are geniuses with 3D art, that are really good at modeling one model in Blender, they kind of suck at what I'm about to show you. I've met a lot of people who don't know how to do this. Okay, so I'm going to show you how to do this and by the end of today's live stream
[snorts]
it's going to look absolutely gorgeous. It really will. Uh huge huge thank you to Matt or Mad Matt Andre What is it? Andre? Who is it? Andreas Seckler. Yeah, sorry. I've got a screen in front of that.

Andreas, Arthro, Liam, Aaron Smith. Uh Jaroslav, Matt, the multifaceted master Joseph O, James W, and Ivan. Welcome welcome welcome to Full Time Game Dev. And by the way, guys, if you want a shout-out in tomorrow's live stream, and I'm going to be doing these ad reads for just a little bit here um for these live streams. But if you want a shout-out with your name in the next live stream, check out the Full Time Game Dev spring sale. The link is below. If you want to join. Guys, if you're on the fence about making games or maybe you're super confused and you're like you don't know which step to follow and which direction to go, but you know you want to make indie games and you know you want to start a game studio, check out the spring sale below. It's 50% off my massive game dev course with over 4,500 students worldwide. You also going to get my 2D art program, my 3D art program completely free, but only for this sale event. And there are only 100 seats available. Look, you don't have to take it from me, although maybe you should because I do have some credibility here.

These are my games Pinstripe and NeverSong and I'm also wrapping up Twisted Tower, which is my third commercial release. And this is really cool actually. This is the PlayStation collector's edition for NeverSong. So, I'm an actual indie game developer in the trenches making indie games. I get published. I work I tend to work with publishers. I'll give them an idea. I'll pitch that idea to them and then I'll sell the idea to them and we'll partner up and we'll work on a game together, right? That's how I do things. I do the artwork. I do the music, right? Sometimes I'll hire out to do the artwork. But I'm an indie game developer working on indie games. So, you're being taught by an actual indie game developer. That's what makes this program special. But if you don't want to trust me and you don't believe me, at least take a look at the reviews on the website. These are students who actually went full time with the help of the program. Whether it was Kickstarter, whether it was working with a publisher, whether it was just, you know, hitting the Steam front page and selling copies of their games and and getting good marketing advice on how to hit the Steam front page. These students went

full time, which is so freaking cool. So, check out the link below. This course is awesome. 30-day money-back guarantee. There's no questions asked. Look, if it's not for you, I don't want your money. But if it is for you, then it's an investment in your future. So, there's really no risk here. So, at least click the link below. And by the way, if you're a student in the program, let me know what you think about the program in the chat. Anyway, let's go ahead and open up Unity here and get started. Get started here. Uh sir, please give me an answer. Can educational games be successful? Sure. I have I I don't know about educational games. I have no idea. But you know, maybe. That's not my uh paradigm that I that I work in. Okay. Welcome welcome welcome everybody. I wish I could get some coffee. Can somebody please get me some coffee? Um hey man, happy to see so many videos these days. Keep up the awesome work. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm a student and I love the Discord server. That's awesome.

Um True Play, welcome welcome welcome. Kev the Dev. I need to be spoon-fed color theory because I am dumb. You are not dumb. Quit lying to yourself. Uh Your courses are a must-have. I have learned a ton. That's awesome. Thank you so much, guys. The program is worth it, everybody. Aw. Sorry, guys. That means a lot to me. Feel I'm feeling a little insecure today if I'm being completely honest with you guys. Um Thank you. Sorry. Um Okay, let's start with um What in the world, Thomas? What is your problem? Uh scale. Scale. Let's start with scale. Y'all ready to go with uh scale here? Scale is so interesting, okay?

This is how the game looks with bad scale. You ready? This is bad scale. Okay, that tree looks fine, I guess. What is this, right? What am I looking at? Is the player giant? Is the player small? I don't know. That tree looks a little small. I It almost looks like I could jump on top of it. Um That Is that a rock? I don't know what that is. So, scale is one of those things that informs what the object is. It also informs how big the player is, right? Um so, let's see here. Let's first start with scale. Well, I cheated a little bit here and I made the scale incorrect just to show you how important scale is. This is the thing and I talked about this earlier. Game developers, they're really good at one craft, right? So, you have a 3D artist, he's really really good at trees. And you're like, "I got to work

with the tree expert." And so, you you reach out to the tree expert on Discord or email him and you're like, "I'll pay you $5,000 to do trees for my game." The problem is the trees look great, but the scale is wrong. And so, it just looks like trash. So, we're going to make this one by one by one. And I'm going to apply this to all of my trees and move them up. Right? Good. Good. How we doing in the chat? Fox Knight, welcome welcome welcome. Yostin TV, Cyber Rift Games. Um welcome welcome welcome. How's everybody doing today? Come on in. Come on in. Come on in. You know, it's so frustrating. The chat always ends up stopping randomly. Are we in the chat? Is everybody good in the chat? Double check. Double check. Double check. Are we good in the chat? Let me know. Cuz all I'm seeing is you need have cube. You need have cube. But Okay, there we go. Good day. There we go. All right. So, we got people in the

chat. Y'all ask questions. Let me know what you think about Thomas today. Let me know if you like Thomas cuz that's really why I live stream
[snorts]
to know that you like me. That's not true. Actually, it really isn't. Okay, let's go ahead and um take a look now at our new scale. Well, let's set this one to 111. Let's apply all. And so, scale is one of those things you need to uh incorporate into your game and test out and really get it perfect before you commit to set dressing, okay? How do you know if the scale is correct? Well, number one, I can just test it, right? And I can feel it out. But another way is to make sure you put a cube in the scene, okay? If you know how big this cube is, you can then create a bunch of other assets, okay? And believe it or not, even um Valve does this. Valve will Valve will say, "Okay, well, this is how big an object is relative to a player height."

Now, all other objects are relative to that box. So, if I know that this box is half the height of a player, well, let's think about that. It's a what? It's a desk, right? My desk here is about half of my height, I think. No, it's about I'm 6'2". So, it's probably like a a a vanity for a bathroom, maybe. So, this half this box height is a vanity. Does that make sense? So, if I know that this box is a vanity, I can determine then the size of everything else. Okay? This is super duper important. Um In fact, I'm going to call this vanity so that I know how big it is, right? It's a vanity. I'm going to just make it look like a vanity so that I know the relative size of things, okay?

I'm going to call it vanity. Does that make sense? Does anyone have question about scale? That's the first point here is scale. I want to know how big an object is in the real world and then I can compare that to all the other objects, okay? So there's the vanity in our world. The trees look a little big, don't they? They look a little bit big. Well, maybe we could scale this and just sort of eyeball it now that we can see the vanity, right? Maybe we just need more detailing, right? Maybe that's what it the problem is. So let's add some more detailing. Often times the problem is not necessarily scale, it's your level of detail, right? That could be the problem. So I'm going to do something like this, right? Maybe add a little bit more detailing. Maybe that's the the solution to our scaling problem.

Okay, so we're going to do a little bit of detail here. I'm going to apply all and see if that helped us. It did. Okay? All right, so that's scale. Okay? Let's also take a look at these big boulders, right? If I know that's the size of a vanity, well, let's let's create some really big boulders that sort of stick out in the world. And we're going to get rid of the vanity, obviously. But now I'm starting to get an idea of the size of my world because I can see a relative image in the scene. Also, I could do a um I could do a capsule collider or I could even bring in a humanoid character, right? I could bring a capsule in here which by the way is 1 by 1. But it's kind of frustrating because it's actually two units high. I kind of wish it was two. But the default is one, but that's actually two times the height

of a cube. So that is the player height right there. See that? If we go to this mode here, there we go. All right. TruePlayGames is having a blast in the chat. All right. So we've got the character height right here, so we can see that relative size to all the other objects, right? Um so let's see here. I could add a little bit more detailing, right? And that detailing is going to help us with scale. Sometimes things just need more detail and then they don't look nearly as uh gargantuan, okay?

So I'm just going to add some details here. There we go. I'm going to hit apply all. There we go. And now we have some detail added to our spheres. There we go. Good, good, good. A little bit more detail added. And we have our stones here, right? Their size is good. Now let's talk about distribution, okay? Distribution is right now, everything's kind of sparse. And in fact, I've seen a lot of developers it looks like this. They distribute especially nature, they distribute nature like it's uh a robot distributed it. But what's what is the thing about nature? Nature likes to grow in what? Nature likes to grow in groups, right? So I you can notice I already naturally did it here. But a lot of developers, they're going to do this. Okay? They'll just okay, there's a rock,

there's a rock, there's a rock. This doesn't look natural. This looks really it's kind of off-putting, right? And so what you want to do and I I do this with furniture as well. Like if I'm making an interior game, same is true with with furniture. Human beings, we like to group our furniture like nature likes to group, right? We make little coves and uh little corners with our furniture. Nature does the same thing. It creates little sect little groups and little sections of things. So what you want to do instead is group together your assets, okay? So that is another trick to making your assets look or your scene look beautiful. I'm going to do 1.5 by 1.5 by 1.5 so that this one's a little bit bigger, right? Maybe put it behind here. And I don't love that the way that tree looks. We're going to clean it up here.

That's a little too big. 1.2 by 1.2 by 1.2. There we go. You can rotate them, right? You do that. We're going to group this together. Group this together. Does this make sense, guys, what I'm saying? Scale and grouping are one of those things that separate a beautiful game from an ugly game. You just get this weird sense that it just feels fake. It feels foreign. It doesn't feel uh What's the word? Natural, right? And by the way, those of you just joining us, if you want a shout-out in tomorrow's live stream, check out full time game dev below, which is 50% off for the spring sale. It's that time of year when Thomas rambles and rambles about his course because I do my quarterly sale. So it is the spring sale. Okay, let's put this here and then one over here.

So we're just distributing our trees. 0.85 0.85 0.85. But truthfully, it really is a great course, so check it out below. See if it's something you're interested in. Okay, here we go. Good. I'm going to rotate that one as well. Okay, let's talk about grouping. That's actually okay. Let's talk about grouping the stones, right? So the stones, what we can do is like this. And notice how it's not even, right? We're not doing this. We're distributing them like so. Big fat groups of stones. Do you see how it already looks better, guys? Look at that. And this is just these are just spheres, right? Really simple spheres. This one probably needs to be a little bit smaller. Let me know if you have any questions in the chat by by the way, guys. Um Let me know in the chat.

That's exactly right. You break up the repetition and Jury Dev says it really well. You want clusters. And this is not only true with artwork, this is or I'm sorry, with nature, this is true with um this is true with with interiors as well. Clusters and groups of things. Always it just feels better. Something about human beings, we and nature, we love clusters. We like families of things. Everything needs kind of a sibling, right? But sometimes they don't. Like one of these guys, he's fine. Um but you never want them to be like That's why social distancing felt so unnatural uh during COVID. This is not natural. It feels odd, right? Don't social distance your trees. Okay, we're going to make a big old fat group over here as well and then we're going to move on to the next one, which is color, okay?

All right, we've got groups. Good. So far so good. I'm going to delete this now that I have our scale done. I'm going to save the scene and hit play and just see how this feels, guys. How do I keep motivating myself every day? I don't ask me, man. I've been burnt out to the nth degree. I have kids and I got to provide for my kids. I can't make a I can't just quit my game because the game is going to provide for the family. I can't keep, you know, I can't quit YouTube cuz YouTube provides for the family. I can't be an a jerk to my publisher cuz my publisher provides for my family. So, you know, you got to keep powering through for your family. That's I've found that financial obligation is the greatest motivator. Sorry. That's just the way it is, guys. Okay, let's rotate this here and I noticed there was an issue with the spheres. I I couldn't walk on them for some reason. Maybe this. No, we're good.

Okay, guys, next up next up, let's talk about the third the third way to make your game look incredible and that is really, really solid color theory. When in doubt, and I didn't want to do this because I feel like you guys wouldn't trust me. Um but I think most of you know Thomas Brush is pretty good with color theory, right? I think most of you know that. So I don't have to prove myself here. So this is really for your benefit what I'm about to do. I'm about to cheat, okay? We're going to find a game that has great color theory, okay? Um and it's called I'm going to use Wind Waker. We're going to use Wind Waker as our color theorist, okay? You don't always have to be the color theorist. Right? Sometimes you can just steal. Sometimes you can just steal, especially

with with a game that's just so freaking beautiful. Which is Wind Waker. Now, I'm going to clean this color up because I think this color looks a little dated if I'm honest. Um but yeah, this is the idea. Now, watch this. When you blur, let's do a mosaic, okay? When you do a mosaic, you can start to see the colors the base colors that they used for this game. Okay, you don't have to do this, but this is the idea. How Now, let's study this. This this shot, right? Cuz a lot of these shots look this way in Wind Waker. Especially in the open sea, what percentage is blue, what percentage is very light white blue, what percentage is red, what percentage is green, right? Of this of this of this single shot here. I'm going to create color theory little boxes, little swatches here that are that same percentage.

I'm going to cover up the screen with that much color. Does that make sense? So, in my case, I know that we're actually going to do a lot of green, okay? So, I'm going to do that much green. This is going to make sense, I promise. I don't love that green, so I'm going to just shift it a little bit. You guys know I like yellowy greens. There we go. Um okay, I've got a yellowy green. So, the majority of my scene's going to be a yellowy green. Uh some of my scene is going to be like stone, like a brownish stone. So, I'm going to grab that color here. That's a good color. Okay? I'm going to grab the sky color, which is this sort of greenish blue. Now, it's going to it's going to fade to that blue color. It You can do it You can do sizes sizes for your swatches as big as you want in your Photoshop file. This is purely for reference, okay? This Photoshop file is not actually going to be used. It's just for my reference.

So, there's my sky. I'm going to have a lot of sky, though. Okay? And I'm going to have not so much of this. This is purely for my reference, guys. I'm scaling I'm scaling the the swatches here just because mentally, I want to see I want to feel what it looks like. So, you we're we're we're we're basically creating color in the abstract. We're We're abstracting our scene's look down to the most basic shapes, which is just squares. If I wanted to, I could think of what I'm making right now, these swatches, as a piece of art. How do I make the most basic shapes beautiful? Because when I extend that into my game and add it to my 3D objects, it's just going to look prettier and prettier and prettier. So, you want it to look as pretty as possible in the most basic shapes. Does anyone have any questions there?

If you're making a monochrome game like Obra Dinn, uh then just use monochrome.
[laughter]
Just Just use monochrome. Um there's also a burnt orange.
[snorts]
There we go. And that is our color palette. So, I can delete this. And now I can just throw this into our scene, or I'm sorry, uh get this sort of finalized here. Crop this. And that is my final color palette. So, to answer a If anyone's confused, you're thinking, "Why did he choose this canvas size?" Well, I don't care what the canvas size is. This is just for my reference. I'm going to use the color picker tool here. Uh why did he choose all those colors? I just picked the most the the most averaged colors, the distillation of that scene, I picked those and put them and filled in some cubes.

Or you're thinking, "Why did he make the certain size for each cube?" Well, those are That's based on how much I'm going to use that color in my scene. So, the red might even be a little bit smaller here. This is only for me to know if this looks good. You can't know if this looks good if you've made if you've put that there. It's like, "Well, I guess it looks good." But when it's small and it's the accent, ooh, it looks great. Does that make sense, guys, what I'm saying? Is anybody confused by that? Kevthedev, thank you so much. Thomas's color theory tutorials helped me in my last game jam. Buy his course. Okay. [laughter] Um Hopefully that helps. And none of this is advanced, by the way. All I'm doing is grabbing a screenshot from a game I like

and putting the most basic colors into my shot here. Now, I'm going to tweak it a little bit. There we go. Um I'm going to tweak it a little bit, and then this one I feel like needs to be a little bit more red. Yeah, this is going to feel more like Fez. I'm going to make this a little bit more green. Yay! I love pastels, man. I really do. So, that's that's it. This could probably be a little bit more desaturated and lighter. Maybe move towards There we go. So, this is my color palette, guys. Why am I doing this? I'm going to bring this over to my other monitor so that I could see the colors, and I'm going to start creating materials. All right? First one I want, skybox, okay? I already have a skybox image that I used in the previous live stream. I'm going to open this up, and I'm going to delete everything so that all we have is just a white image here, okay? So, this is my skybox.

Panoramic skybox. It's just an image in Photoshop, or you could do it in I'm going to grab this uh blue horizon here, copy it, bring it into here, and we're just going to generate our skybox. It's just a gradient, but it needs to be an image. Cuz I don't think you have these kind of controls unless you downloaded a specific shader. We don't have those kind of controls to just create a gradient skybox. I wish I wish we did. That would be really cool in Unity. Um but yeah, we're just going to eyeball this, and I chose a random size here. I don't really care what it is. 6,000 by 1688, I don't care. Um and we're just going to do this. Okay? Let's save our skybox, and that's the first thing we want to put into our scene. Okay? So, let's go ahead and go to our inspector here. All right, I'm sorry, a lighting go to environment, drag in the skybox here, make sure that that skybox has the new

image. And there we go. So, already it's looking good. Let's adjust our lighting tab here. You could go to the environment lighting here. And this is the only global light in a scene. And just so you know, this light gets baked out if you bake the lights. We're not going to get into baking today. Everything's going to be real time. If you want to bake in a global light, it's called an area light. It's different than a directional light because it's just everything gets painted with this light. There's no directionality to it. That's baked, so that's called an area light. Area lights cannot be real time. So, if you want a real-time area light, aka just a global light that fills in all the shadows, just use this environment lighting, make the source skybox, and all that's going to do is it's going to have a color hue to it, or a hue to it, and I'm going to increase the intensity here just a little bit.

Like .2, and we'll tweak that value once we get all the colors added. Okay? That's our first step. Let's hit play and take a look. Okay, any any uh any questions, guys? Any questions so far? How we doing? Is everybody happy? Are we Are we having a good time today? I I love teaching this stuff. I love teaching about color. There's nothing more exciting than color because color is the lowest hanging fruit possible, guys. By the way, I'm going to remove the color from this gun. This is left over from a previous stream. We're just going to do the steel color just for now. Cuz I like to start with gray and then start to fill in the color. Make sense? So, does anybody have any questions before I move forward here? Does anyone have Seriously, does anyone have any questions before I move forward here? What do we got?

Uh Asmiel says, "What are we doing? Can someone please explain?" We're taking the simplest gray box scene possible, and we're using six or a five principles that are the lowest hanging fruit five principles possible to make a scene look incredible. We're not using any modeling or textures. I'm showing you the basic most lowest hanging hanging fruit possible to make a beautiful scene. That's the goal here, because I want all of you to be able to use these core principles to make a more detailed look game look incredible. Because if you can't get these down, if you can't master what I'm sharing it with you right now, no amount of detail's going to make your game look good. Okay? All right. Does real-time light make the scene heavy? Yes, unless you have a nice light occlusion system. They have some on the asset store. And basically it's just going to fade in and fade out fade in and fade out lights as

you move through a scene based on the player's position. So basically you're only really rendering like three of the lights of and there's a hundred lights. Number two. Number two. If you remove all uh mesh shadows being cast, so select your mesh and turn lighting off. I actually have a Unity editor tool that will go through all my scenes and turn off all shadow casting. Now, it doesn't mean it doesn't up for for the meshes. This doesn't mean I stay that way. What I'll do is I'll go in and pick the meshes that need shadows. Also, I'll turn off all shadows from all my lights. And then I'll pick certain lights that should cast shadows. That way you're reducing thousands of meshes and shadows to just like two. Not everything needs a shadow, right? In this case, it's a very simple scene, so I'm not going to worry about that.

Yep, we're going to add some add some fog and some and some lighting and all of that, okay? Fog is going to be a lighting discussion, but for now let's go ahead and get our colors correct, okay? You guys ready? Um the first one I want to do is the stone. I'm sorry, the grass. So let's go to our color palette. This is our grass. I'm going to create a new material with this hue. I'm going to copy that hue. Go into Unity. I'm going to go to my materials. Let's go to my global materials. My world materials, I mean. And I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to call it grass. It's going to look really pretty with no smoothness. I'm going to add the grass here. And then let's also add the ground here. But you notice I need to make sure I set the ground color correct. So let's grab this color here. Copy the hue right here. Copy that and paste it here. Boom. I'm going to hit apply all. And now everything has the grass

and the ground cuz it's all a prefab. I'm going to go ahead and bring in the grass here. There we go. Let's hit play. See how this looks. Already ten times better. What did I freaking tell you? But we don't even have lighting yet. We don't even have shadows. Right? Okay, let's make sure our stone that's all sharing ground. Good. Okay, what about the trees? Okay, we're going to go ahead just go inside of the tree itself.
[snorts]
And all of the spheres are going to have the grass. And all of the cylinders are going to have the ground. But Thomas bark is different than ground. Not in our game. We want it to be simplic a simple, beautiful, clean, consistent color palette. All right, let's hit play. Take a look at everything. That's a smart idea.

Is an Is that an editor script you just click a button to run? I assume you're talking about the shadows turning off. Yes. So I'll have Claude write me scripts where um it Claude is great for editor tools, by the way. And I'm going to clean this up. Uh Claude is great for editor tools. If you ever need something to quickly occur, just have Claude write a script for it. Say, I need a script that will go through all of my scenes and turn off shadows from all of the prefabs. So I have one for that. I'm going to I'm going to make clean up this tree really quick, guys. Just give me just a sec. It's driving me crazy. And we're going to use the same sort of scale principles that we've been learning today. And just distribute these. Okay? All right. And just while we do this, just remember to click that link below if you're interested in joining the course. It is 50% off for a limited time.

Okay. We're almost there. Sorry if you guys can hear a lawnmower. Let's scale that up here. We're going to treat that one as its own little piece now. We're almost there. So these are going to look really stylized, right? And these are going to apply to all trees. Okay. Now obviously this isn't the most efficient way to make a freaking tree, obviously. Um but we're just trying to use very simple shapes in Unity to capture a vibe, okay? And to apply these principles that we're learning today. Okay, so there's our tree. I'm going to save it.

Good. Good. Good. Hit apply or hit play and just take a look at everything. I may just delete all of the detailing there cuz I don't know if we need it anymore. I think it's fine, actually. Now we need to rotate some of these. Right? Here we go. Uh this one we got to add the grass to it, the grass color and then the ground color to it. And then we're just going to hit apply all. So that all the prefabs receive that. Okay, what's the next thing, right? Well, we've got color, but you'll notice we don't have the pop of color. Let's remove this here. You'll notice we don't have a pop of color. We can add a pop of color by adding just simple clean flowers to the scene. And we could just do that with a quad. Now you're probably thinking, "Well, it's not really worth our time." Absolutely it is worth our time.

Okay? So I'm going to call this flowers quad. This is so worth our time. Uh an accent color is you might notice in a lot of movies why it's like Why does that movie look so stylized? It's typically because there's a pop of color in every shot. It's a light a little red light in the background and it's perfectly complementing a a blue sort of overlay or fog that the that the movie has. Uh Tim Burton does this all the time with his movies. It's really drab and grayish purple, but then there's a pop of pink, right? We're going to do that here. We're going to go to the canvas size here. We're going to do 1920 by 1920. I'm just going to reuse this document. You'll notice I duplicated it here. I called it flower quad. And I'm just going to take that red and I'm just going to create pops of color with a with a circle. But I'm going to make it white.

So I'm going to do this. These are our flower quads. Flowers grow in groups, right? I'm going to delete this. Save that. Center it up. Save and then go back to Unity here. I'm going to go ahead and just create a new quad. It's right here. And I'm going to drag that texture onto it. And yes, we do want it to cast shadows cuz it's going to create a really cool effect. Um but I'm going to go ahead and just drag in that new art. Flower quad here. Boop. There we go. You'll notice it looks terrible, right? Uh we want to make sure that we set it to transparent. But before we do that, we need to go to the texture itself. Uh you make sure that it's alpha's transparency is true. Remove PSD mat. Hit apply, right? There we go. Very good. But the material that was created from this texture, we want it to be

uh opaque but with alpha clipping. And the reason why is so that we can do really cool shadows. So there's our alpha clipping. Good. Okay, let's go ahead and change its color to be that red color, right? Uh let's go to our color palette. Grab that red color. And hang tight, guys. Hang tight because it's going to look amazing, I promise. You just got to hang tight. Trust the process. Trust the process. So there we go. No smoothness. Uh we do want it to cast shadows. It will. But for now, that's all we really need right here. So I'm going to take that quad. I'm going to call it flowers quad. Does it need a collider on it? No. And I'm going to drag it into our prefabs and distribute them throughout our scene. Right? If I could turn off lighting even. Um We can kind of see how it's going to look with uh with no lighting. So I'm just going to rotate these all

over. And you know, we might want to make them bigger. So let's let's hit the play mode actually and take a look. All right. So let's see where those quads are. For some reason I don't see them. Did they fall? Was there a rigid body on them? I don't know, actually. Let's take a look. They're tiny little things. Um let's see if we can scale them up, what happens. Hit apply all. Let's take a look. I should be able to see it, but for some reason I'm not. There they are. All right, we have a pop of color. Now, what you can do is you can add an emissive to it. Um and that emissive will make it so that they're always sort of emitting that pop of color, right? So, let's see here.

Oh, why do I feel insecure lately? I've just been working on a game for 5 years and I feel like I'm not delivering. Um it's it's good. It's getting good marks on on uh beta testing, but it's just it's been a rough week. It's been a really rough week, guys. And I'm tired. Um yeah. That's why. Okay, let's move this over, move it up. And it's like super disorienting, guys, to do beta testing cuz 1 minute you'll get a five from somebody. They'll be like, "Five out of 10. Terrible game." And then you'll get a 10 in like 5 seconds. And you're like, "What happened?" Uh so, you get It's really disorienting. Beta testing is kind of it's not my favorite, I'll be honest, and I'm I'm currently in beta testing right now. So, let's put some pops of color here. And obviously, you can do this with texture work as well, guys. Um

Alpha clipping works how? Uh it's doing it in on It's It's It's basically not um It's kind of like almost making a mesh out of it. Like, that's the best way I can describe it. And there's a threshold and it's just cutting it. It's actually cutting it. There's no transparent pixels, you'll notice. Which I think makes it more efficient to render shadows. Uh but yeah, let's uh let's let's crank up the emission of it so that it's always glowing regardless of the color of the light. And this is just a way to make it feel a little bit more stylized, right? So, we could crank up the emission here. And I can crank it up really intense, right? So, it's always or you could use a sprite a sprite shader um that or an unlit shader even. So, if I wanted to, I could say, "You know what? I want this to be completely unlit." So, I could go to um uh unlit here. And now it's just going to

always be that color. Right? So, that's another way to do it. Okay. Pops of color, let's add them to our scene. Yeah, I'm definitely ready to start the next game, guys. Um I'm ready to just start something that's a little bit more manageable in its scope and a little bit more not as dark. I'm very tired of of the dark aesthetic. But I I also live for the dark aesthetic, so I've just kind of like I I I have I have been the most exhausted and bottlenecked I have ever been. Um and it's been hard. But I'm not going to complain. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it has been hard. Uh exhausting.

So, let's keep uh placing these around. Look at some of them, you could say, "You know what? Let's do a white one." So, we're just using simple color. I'll make it a little bit creamy here. Come on. There we go. I'm going to call this flowers quad white. Great name. Flower quad white. Drag them in, right? Oh, Andrew Poole. Yeah, I appreciate it, bud. Yeah, I remember your review. Andrew Andrew gave it a great review.
[sighs and gasps]
Don't spoil anything, Andrew. How am I surviving? Um well, I burned through all of my publisher funding.

And they also had budget cuts for the project, which was great. Um so, YouTube is a great way right now for me to survive. Um course sales help a lot. Thank you guys so much for those of you who enroll. Um but that's not my primary like revenue or like how I fund a game. You know, I'll I'll sign with a publisher and it'll it'll be going great and we'll be funded and yay, hooray, and I'm just I'm just working on the game, you know? And then all of a sudden you're out of money and you got to find a way to fund it. Um this is the first time that's happened to me. I never ran out of money until this project and this is where it got really tight. Um but that's okay. Such is life. That's the way game dev works. There There's always a point, I think, with big ambitious games where you run out of money and you got to go find more of it. And that's um I'll probably do a whole video about it.

If I'm being honest. But we're almost done. We're almost done.
[snorts]
Yeah, that's true, Mike. Do you Do you find working with a publisher creates less urgency? No, it's more. Way more urgency. And that's a good thing for me cuz I'll just sit and I'll just sit and polish things like I'm doing with these flowers forever and ever and ever. All right, we've got a polish or a a pop of color here. Looks good. All right, we need to go ahead and move into lighting. Let's go ahead and colorize our gun though really quick. Um the gun we can probably just do the

ground color. Right? And then we can do the um Well, yeah, let's do a pop of color. Let's do the uh um Let's just do it call it red. And it's this color right here. So, we'll do a little pop of color on the gun as well. Okay. So, why am I doing this? Like, what's my point? My point is to show you guys how color can achieve massive gains for your game as long as you know what your color palette is and you've chosen a decent color palette, right? Okay, our the lighting is terrible. So, let's go ahead and move into lighting really quick. Let's move this over though. This needs to be moved over a little bit.

Well, I don't know why those are off-center, but yeah, let's add some red to these as well. And yeah. Just move them over so they're nice and even. We'll add some red. Save it. Take a look. All right. I kind of feel like these are annoying looking, so I'm just going to delete them and just keep that red at Unity to someone wanting to start out or not? Um hope you're well, too, man. Uh yes,

definitely. Unity is always my recommendation. I love Unity. It's great. Okay. Um next next step is lighting. Um you'll notice our lighting sucks. We're going to turn on shadows for one. So, we're going to do uh soft shadows. Make sure you have lighting on. And I'm going to reduce the strength of the shadows. We probably need to increase the intensity. Just so that yes, we have evening light, but it's intense. I'm actually going to warm it up a little bit. There we go. Crank up the intensity. And I'm going to go to my ultra pipeline renderer. I'm going to increase the draw distance of our um Where is it? Hang on. There it is. Uh we're going to go to our draw

distance for Where is it? There it is. Okay. Draw distance I'm going to set to like 150. And you should You really shouldn't do this. But for the purposes of this game, it's super simple, so I'm going to do 150. Or maybe just 100. I'm going to save it. And actually, you know what? I'm going to do hard shadows. Nice and crisp. Let's hit play and take a look. So, already significantly better. Okay? Now, we want to do a trick that I love. You ready for the trick? The trick is create an opposing light in the opposite direction at the opposite color. So, like a green or a blue. We're just going to it is this is kind of mimicking global illumination and just kind of filling in those shadows.

You can even go pretty saturated and then drop it down. There we go. So, let's see the difference. Look. But, I'm going to turn off shadows. No shadows. We don't want it We don't want any shadows in this in this case. Now, we could do pink maybe. Right? You could You could figure out a way to make it feel a little bit more stylized. I actually kind of like that red. Isn't that cool? Maybe a little bit pink. Yeah, it kind of feels like a Animal Crossing. Thomas, I I find myself focusing on really small details like naming conventions, folder manage management, code order, etc. And I feel like it really slows my game delivery way too much. Any ideas for OCD devs? Uh the only thing I can tell you is that that is a problem. And it's probably because you're afraid of making the actual game itself. That's I and unless you're actually OCD, um I would say that you're probably just afraid of making the game itself because

you're afraid that it's going to suck. If I'm being honest with you. Okay, that's a little too red, but the idea is there. Let's see if we can do pinkish maybe. Just fill in a little bit of a hue there. Okay, um we filled in those shadows. Now, obviously guys, you could fill in shadows using this as well, right? This is our our global light. I'm actually going to turn it off now. Because I filled in the shadows with the light in the other direction. So, let's let's again, let's take a look to be sure we're happy. Pretty good. Pretty good here. Okay. Uh let's see if we can add a little bit more emphasis on our lights. Um I'm trying to think here.

What other tricks we could do with this light source? Well, we could definitely just create a lamp post. Right? So, let's do that. Let's create a 3D object, which is going to be just a a sphere. Right? Just like this. Shrink it down and we're going to go ahead and add an emissive. In this case, we already have one called wall light yellow and all it is is just an emissive. Okay? With a base map. But, no specular. Okay? Let's go ahead and add a 3D object. In this case, we're going to add a um cu- a cube. And this cube is going to be the lamp post. Post. Right? Scale it up. Just like so. We're going to do .15 4 .15. So, it's basically going to be

twice as tall as the player. Maybe we can do a little bit smaller. Maybe .1 .1 .1. There we go. How about .06 .06? And then spring this up here. Let's go a little bit higher. .5 .5 .5. And there we go. We have a lamp post. Make sure we drag in our ground here. There we go. I'm going to hit um I'm going to drag this into our prefabs here. Now, we have a lamp post and we can also add a little bit of light here. Now, you're going to say, "Well, Thomas, I don't really see the light." And that's because the scene is already pretty bright. So, the benefit of having light sources like this in your scene is that you don't have to rely so heavily on directional light and you can start creating texture with light. Let me show you what I mean here. I'm going to create a warm light here like this. I'm going to make sure there's soft shadows. I'm going to make sure I turn off shadows though with our lamp post.

Uh bring that light in here. Hit apply all. And so, now we have this lamp post, right? Let's make sure it looks good in terms of its scale. Okay. Pretty good. I need to center up that light. The light needs to be taller. So, we're going to make sure that the cube here is set to six. Okay. Scale that up. This is why it's so important to enter play mode. Uh because it helps you know if you're scaling things appropriately. Let's put a little cap on it like that. And then zero out its light source. There we go. And just do this. I'm going to hit apply all here. Take a look and see how it feels. Now, you notice that the emissive feels kind of ugly, right? It's like, "Why is it so flat looking?" That's because there's no bloom currently. So, we're going to add bloom in a sec.

Okay. So, why am I adding a lamp post? Well, the goal here I'm going to move that sphere up. The goal here and maybe just do 1 by 1 by 1. The goal here is to be able to have lights throughout our scene. To create texture in an otherwise textureless world. Right? So, if I go here, add one here, and add one here. And then add one here. And by the way, this is a principle you can use all throughout various genres, right? I'm just creating a little scene here to show you guys why this is so valuable. I'm going to put one more up here. And then I'm going to basically and we did a little bit of this in in in I think it was last week's live stream. But, basically the idea here is is to um now tone down our lights. Uh our directional lights. If we tone down the directional lights, we can now use these point lights

um to create I guess what you would call uh light texture. So, I can bring this down. I'm going to increase the uh uh strength of the color though. This one I think is fine. That's our That one fills in the shadows, but maybe let's do .5. And now it's going to have more of an evening look, right? So, if I hit play here, let's take a look. Yep. Great. We're adding a lot more texture here. So, it's more of an evening shot. Right? And I'm going What I'm going to do is crank up the the the the range of our point light, right? Do like this. Crank up the intensity, right? Very good. I'm going to hit apply all and you're going to notice

that our scene has a little bit more richness and depth to it. Um let's go ahead and crank up that directional light though. I think it's still a little too soft. There we go. Let's see how this looks. Cool. Yeah. And you can imagine these would be torches or something like that, right? Let me hit uh play here and take a look. It might be a little too yellow. I might warm make them white, but that's that's why that's why adding lighting even on a day scene is so valuable. Because it creates texture. Do you see that? Now, it's a little Like I said, it's a little yellow and then we're missing one major thing, guys, that you're probably you're probably subconsciously you're noticing and you're like, "What is it? What about this scene seems so flat?" I'll tell you in just a sec. Let's make this less warm. There we go. I'm going to hit apply all

and let me show you what we're missing. The final cherry on top in terms of lighting is our fog. Right? So, let's turn on our fog. And what we want to do is match it to the horizon. Just drop down the density here to like .005. 6 7 8. There we go. Yep. Yep. There we go. Okay, let's sit hit play here and take a look. Probably need a little bit more fog. Let's uh exit maximize mode here and try it out here. Let's go to our environment here and do it in real time. Uh we're going to do six. Let's take a look. Yes.

Very good. I'm going to warm up those lights again. And decrease their intensity. Good. Okay. So far, so good. Uh so, what was the value? We're going to need to remember it cuz it's going to revert when we exit play mode. It was .006. There we go. Let's make the light a little bit warm. Even the directional light I feel like needs some warmth added back to it. Yeah. And then these lamp posts we reduce the the warmth a little bit. Actually, no, did I want to increase the warmth? What did I want to do? I can't remember. Yeah, let's increase the warmth for our lamp post. Maybe even go a little red. And then I'm going to hit apply all for those. All right, let's hit play and take a look. We're going to talk all about bloom. That's a whole other uh talking point here.

Very good, Thomas. It's looking good, guys. Let me see one thing here. Kind of looks better with the skybox light filling in the shadows, but let's try a color. Yeah. I kind of love that. So, let's copy that ambient color. I'm going to paste it. We're going to go to color and then paste. And just fill in those shadows just a little bit. Now, this is more of a This is not really a lighting thing, but it's handled in the lighting tab, so we're going to go ahead and do it really quick. We're going to add some clouds. So, we're just going to do this.

And I'm just going to take that, fade out the bottom. Let's save just one of them so I can get it looking perfect, and then I can duplicate them. Okay, so there's that. So, it's squashed, so let's go ahead and squash it in the other direction. Try it again. Yep. And then we're just going to zoom out and start doing this. I'm just holding alt and shift. There we go. And look, you know, you can you can duplicate some in the background, fade them out, just set the alpha to be really low. And we're just creating a lot of depth and richness to that gradient. Maybe one up here as well. And the trick is to cut it a little bit sharper. Like this, and now it looks like it's

more of a stylized like Studio Ghibli cloud. Okay, I'm like that. Save it, take a look. All right. Very good. Clouds are looking good. Um don't forget about adding a little bit of a tiny lens flare to our directional light. Right? So, we have our main directional light, right? I'm going to add a lens flare to that. It's going to be a lens flare SRP. Right? And I believe if we enter play mode, it's probably best to I don't believe it's showing up for some reason, so let's see. Let's exit uh maximized mode so we can see what's going on here. There it is. There's our lens flare. So, what I like to do is sort of match the lens flare uh to um the sky skybox sun, right? And it's kind of tough to do this, um but basically you just put it there and then

just look at where it's at. Where did it go? Okay, so I need to move it to the left. Almost all the way over here. Almost there. Is it right there, really? Oh my goodness, it's all the way over here. And then we're going to squash it. Bring it down. Almost there. Almost there. There it is. And then we'll just squash it up a little bit. And then blur it. Just so you get a little bit of a sun in our skybox. Let's make sure we actually needed to squash that. Yeah, we did. Okay. Okay, there's our sun. It's stretching just cuz of the uh the camera field of view. Um okay, so we have our sun. We have our clouds. We have lighting, right? We have pops of color in the gun and also in the grass.

Right? The next big step here What was it? Well, let's double check. Post processing. So, this is the the the last sort of cherry on top to get this scene looking beautiful, okay? So, let's go to post processing here. It's going to be called global. It's in Unity 6 it start it it's in default in the scene called global. Um go to bloom, motion blur. I'm going to add I turn off motion blur, I hate it. Let's add a vignette here, just a subtle vignette. Be careful with vignettes, guys. You're going to be tempted to do this. Oh, that looks cool, Mom. No. Frankly, I don't I don't even know if you need to add a little a vignette. Just a very subtle vignette. Uh bloom, I'm going to I like to go pretty low with threshold. Um but low with the intensity as well. Just so it's sort of got a foggy look to it. Increase the scatter. Honestly, we probably need to

We won. Scatter. I'm going to make this red a little bit darker cuz it's kind of driving me nuts here. There we go. Let's hit play and take a look. Yeah, I don't know if I have that discipline though, plus I always like making my games bigger. Uh bloom looks good for the lights now. Sweet. Okay. What else we got? Well, I like to do a little bit of just a tiny little bit of color correction. Right? Um depth of field, I don't like depth of field. I never like depth of field. That's just me. Uh color adjustments, we're going to do a little bit of contrast. Right? I don't know if we need to do post exposure. Um and why don't we go ahead and do a little bit of uh

Shadows, midtones, and highlights. We're going to bring the shadows down to be a little bit more blue. Not too much or else it's going to look like an Instagram filter. And then crank up our midtones. And then maybe warm up our highlights just a bit. I don't love doing this, honestly. But it's it's going to be fine here. I'm going to actually reset this one. Let's hit play and take a look.
[sighs]
Okay. And the bonus, ladies and gentlemen, the bonus is going to be ambiance and music. And that that is really going to double the cool factor and the intensity

of this little scene, even though it's just spheres and cubes. Okay? Before Before we add music, let's add a little bit of sound effects here, okay? All I want to do is uh type in um summer field ambiance. Okay? So, let's do that. That's good enough for me. And then let's also go to our music and I'm going to type in adventure in Peru. I don't know. Let's see if we can find some cool like Peru music. No.

This looks fun. What's this? Let's type in adventure game Zelda and see what we can come up with here. Oh man, I really want you to stop. I kind of liked this one. It's kind of cool. Let's use that one. I'm going to bring these both into the game. I'm just going to add them to my sounds folder in Windows Explorer. Hang tight. Okay. I'm going to add these in and we're going to get that final result, guys. And it's going to be really really cool because all of a sudden and I talk I've talked

about this in previous streams, all of a sudden the game's going to feel alive. It's going to feel and it's going to feel serious. It's going to have a serious tone to it. By the way, I'm looking at the scene right now and I want to add a little bit of bloom to this skybox in and of itself. So, as my music imports, I'm going to go ahead and blur this. Like so. So, it's going to add a little bit of bloom to our skybox. So, it's it's a little bit much there. Hang on. I'm going to reduce the contrast as well. I feel like that contrast is a little too much. So let's go to our our color adjustments. Drop down our contrast. It's a little too intense. And remember, let's go go ahead and add our music now that it's been imported. Uh I have a music pool or a music audio source. There it is. I'm going to add that sound that music, which was I believe the plateau one? No, that was No, yeah. There it is. There's a plateau one, right? Add that to our music.

Okay, there we go. It's set to point two. That should be good. And then also, remember, we also have an ambience. Let's go ahead and add ambience. I'm going to call this ambience audio source. I'm going to throw in that Colorado wildlife ambience. And we're going to set it to point two. And let's take a look. Are you guys ready? Let's take a look at the final results. You can imagine now we can have bunny rabbits that are evil coming out. Let's Let's increase the music here, guys, so we can get the full final result here. Amazing, right, guys? Absolutely amazing what you can achieve

with lighting, color, post-processing, sound. [music] Now the game feels serious, right? Just because of this music and and the lighting. Right? Just amazing what can be achieved. Hope you guys learned a ton. And if you're interested and you like my teaching style, one final shout-out here. If you like my teaching style and you want to learn from an actual indie game developer currently in the trenches making his third commercial release. By the way, this is my first one or this is my second one. And this is my first one called Pinstripe. So Never Song Pinstripe and my third one is called Twisted Tower. Check out the spring sale for my course. It's 50% off. This is a limited time and I only do these seasonally. 50% off full-time game dev, my massive course course which teaches you everything I've learned in the last decade including securing funding from publishers. I've done that three times. Securing funding on Kickstarter. I've done that two times. Uh hitting the Steam front page. I think I've done that multiple times.

Getting wishlists, reaching out to the press, getting press coverage. I've gotten press coverage from Washington Post, Time Magazine, PC Gamer. I teach how to do all that, but also how to make a game. 2D, 3D, Unity, Godot, Unreal, whichever one you want to learn, take your pick. But also, I'll throw in my 2D art pro and my 3D art programs completely free, but only for this sale event. And if you're not going to trust me, I don't care. That's totally fine. There's also reviews on the front page of people who actually went full-time. So check it out below. Limited time, limited seats, and this sale event won't last forever. Huge shout-out to Matt, Andreas, Arthur, Liam, Aaron, Jaroslav, Matt, Multifaceted, Joseph, James, and Ivan. Thank you so much for joining the program. And if you want to get a shout-out in tomorrow's live stream, feel free to check out the course below. All right, guys, that was really fun. I That was actually really cool. Let's take a look at it one more time. I love how quickly things can look beautiful.

Absolutely. Absolutely. A VR A VR game could definitely you could learn a lot from the course cuz it's a it's a it's about building It's about the scaffolding required for a full-on game studio. Um and that's that includes funding and marketing and um press outreach and campaigning and uh yeah, it's a lot. There's a lot in the course. You'll learn a ton. And by the way, if you're a student in the course, let me know what you think about it in the chat. All right, I love you guys so much. This was a blast. And