During this time I thought I would read more into what Unity is capable of. Since the last time I made anything major in this editor a lot of features it has now were not present.
Lighting:
The most noticable is better lighting; such as ambient occulsion and emissive lights and better baking. The image below is the result of a little experimentation, the lightmap resolution needs increasing a lot for the final bake. But for testing purposes its quick to see what effects can be made.
Eventually when surfaces have textures I'll be able to play with specular highlights and reflections to create some really nice areas.
Foliage:
Also because this level has a lot of trees (I think 150+), I decided to look into SpeedTree, which is widely used in many commmercial games. Resources are limited due to it being a paid service, but there are a handful that can be found, and they look amazing.
This is just a few trees but already it makes a huge difference in the scene. Behind these in the distance is a simple tree backdrop, which is a method used in a lot of games create better looking distances. Coupled with more trees to blur the line, this will eventually look good.
For now though, all this is just polish / later-stage things. It's nice to see how good the project can look, especially at such an early stage.
*On a side note, it turns out Unity doesn't play well with .png transparencies, took me a good while to figure out why some of my textures wouldnt display properly. Targa files with an added alpha channel work much better, but are also typically double in filesize.
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