Matching the SUNTAIL village's post-processing and lighting to the store page look

The textures came in nicely at high resolution, but side by side with the store page screenshots, the feel was pretty different. The store page looked smoother and the shadows were different too. I wanted more realistic shadows and better graphics overall.

Conveniently, the SUNTAIL pack includes the outdoor volume used for the store page screenshots and the demo scene's lighting, so I compared them with my village settings one by one. The condition was not affecting any other scenes.

What I built

The house fronts now catch the sunlight and look bright and clean, and the wall texture looks smoother. I like how the tree and stall shadows fall crisply on the paving stones.

• Post-processing: a new profile copied from the demo's outdoor volume. ACES, exposure +1, contrast +10, saturation +5, bloom 0.4/0.6, vignette 0.3, chromatic aberration 0.045. White balance is 0 and the bloom tint is white to take out the yellow tint, and motion blur is off because it smears when you turn the third-person camera.
• Sunlight: white at 1.15, shadow strength 1.0 and quality High, direction (40, 35, 0), putting it in the south-southwest sky.
• Ambient light: the demo's dark, bluish Trilight (sky (0.285, 0.574, 0.8), equator (0.432, 0.557, 0.7), ground 0.604).
• SSAO: on a renderer just for the village camera, intensity 0.25, direct lighting 0, radius 0.6.

The same spot before the work. Comparing the two, there were three causes.

The shadows looked gray because a bright grayish-white ambient light was filling them in. Shadow strength was also 0.88, and the light's own shadow quality was overridden to Low. The surfaces looked jittery because SSAO was strong (0.8) and also mixed into direct lighting. The Neutral tonemapping, which didn't roll off bright areas softly, played a part too. Finally, the sun was in the northwest, so in the default view, which looks north from the south, every visible house front was in backlit shade.

Looking the other way, south, it's backlit, so the house fronts sink into blue shade and shadows fall long toward the camera. Characters are kept separate from the sunlight's color and direction, so their shading stays the same and only the post-processing applies to them.

After applying it, I checked that the village camera uses the dedicated renderer and the new profile, and that the original renderer's SSAO and the pack's original volume values were unchanged.

Things I thought about

• Going with V2. I captured V0 (before), V1 (demo as is) and V2 (demo + white sunlight + new direction) from the same spot and compared them. I want clear colors in the village, so I went with V2, without the yellow tint.
• Characters get the village post-processing too. Post-processing applies to the whole screen, so I decided to let characters get it as well instead of carving them out.
• Keeping the existing SSAO method. The method the demo uses (AfterOpaque) blew the screen out to white in this project (Forward+ and MSAA).
• A village-only profile and renderer. To keep other scenes' post-processing and renderer (SSAO 0.8) and the pack originals as they were. The only change to the pipeline settings is one more entry in the renderer list.
• Staying on LDR. The demo uses HDR, but the color grading mode is a project-wide setting, so changing it would affect every scene.

Next up

• Light shafts, sunlight through the leaves, window flower boxes and vines are out of scope this time
• If the shade on the backlit side feels too cold, brighten the ambient equator color a little