Using lights and cookie textures to simulate a cloudy day

As it can be seen in many first-person shooters and survival horror games, lights and shadows can add a great deal of realism to a scene, helping immensely to create the right atmosphere for the game. In this recipe, we will create a cloudy outdoor environment using cookie textures. Cookie textures work as masks for lights. It functions by adjusting the intensity of the light projection to the cookie texture's alpha channel. This allows for a silhouette effect (just think of the bat-signal) or, as in this particular case, subtle variations that give a filtered quality to the lighting.

Getting ready

If you don't have access to an image editor, or prefer to skip the texture map elaboration ...

Get Unity 5.x Cookbook now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.