Using VRC Light Volumes in your VNyan World¶
Written by lunazera
VRC Light Volumes are a great way to add great looking and performant lighting into your 3D environments. It is a free and open-source asset that you can get on VRC Light Volumes GitHub Repo.
Light Volumes use voxel based lighting. The main draw back is that you won't get any dynamic shadows, but in return you can have up to 128 individual dynamic light sources in your scene with minimal performance cost. They can change colour and intensity/brightness at runtime. They work with Audiolink for audio-reactivity, and work with Bakery. Baked shadows are also possible with them.
To see their lighting effect, you will need to use shaders that support Light Volumes, such as Poiyomi (as of v9.2, make sure Light Volumes are checked in the shading settings). You can also check out Poiyomi's blog post if you'd like to read more about Light Volumes and why they're cool.
VNyan is already set up to work with Light Volumes, so you can follow workflows applicable to VRChat worlds and they should work the same for VNyan Worlds!
I'll detail some of how you can use Light Volumes here, but refer to the official documentation for full information. There are also example scenes and assets to use for reference.
Basic Setup¶
Once installed, you'll find Light Volume components in your main right-click menu in the scene hierarchy. You'll first need to add a Light Volume to your scene. This will be a resizeable box which you want your lighting to apply.
When you add a Light Volume, you'll also see a Light Volume Manager added into your scene. This will list all the different Light Volume areas in your scene (if you put multiple). You can also change your baking setting here between Unity's or Bakery.
You can start adding lights with the Point Light Volume object. You can change the type to be either Point Light, Spot Light, or Area Light. For these types of lights, change the Light Source Size to match the physical size of the light in your scene (for example, if you're adding a point light to a light bulb, make the radius match the size of the bulb). To change the brightness you will only need to adjust the Color and Intensity.