SkyMagic: Scene customized global illumination

(MacGruber Essentials Plugin Package v2)

This one is NOT an April Fools post :P During the extended Easter weekend I had another attempt at my trial&error research for making custom global illumination work in VaM. I had a new idea to try. After already wasting a weekend on this back in September, this time there was glorious success!

Now you can not only import cubemaps from Unity, you can also bake a custom cubemap from within VaM! This allows you to setup a scene as normal and then produce a scene specific cubemap that matches your light setup perfectly. Of course, SkyMagic works on both, native VaM assets (such as characters, clothing, ...) as well as native Unity assets (imported through a CustomUnityAsset). The latter enables you to use AmbientOcclusion textures for PBR materials, e.g. when using the Standard shader, which can spice things up a lot.

In the included demo scene I first imported a high resolution sky as a CustomUnityAsset. Then I setup my scene and baked a cubemap to be used for global illumination.

The process to bake cubemaps within VaM requires you go through Unity and reimport as AssetBundle. Since this is slightly wonky, I included a tutorial explaining the 3 parts of the plugin: SkyMagicExporter, SkyMagicImporter and SkyMagicLoader. As an extra the tutorial also covers how to import a high resolution sky from hdrihaven.com.

(Latex catsuit from the second comparison picture is not included.)

Download

• https://www.patreon.com/posts/skymagic-package-35944585
• This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after April 27, 2020. You are allowed to reference these packages in your own VAR packages, even if they are paid or use a different licence. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.

Credits

The beach demo scene contains a sky under CC0 licence from HDRIHaven and some public domain audio from SoundBible. The hair was made by our awesome NoStage3.