HDRP Lighting tests

This is my first use of HDRP in Unity and this project I did as a part of one of my Uni modules, that being my learning contract module. In this module it was a 100 hour module set to document and learn a new skill. I chose to learn HDRP and its use case in games due to the nature of my course. I aimed to learn different lighting techniques from baked to realtime and others such as rasterised techniques to ray traced. Additionally in the 50 hours of learning I also looked into graphical optimisations for HDRP for everything across the board from mesh optimisations to reflection probe optimisations. For the time given of 50 hours of learning this most certainly isn't enough time to learn the extents of lighting techniques and graphical optimisations but I am pleased with the 30 hours of practical production. Note the rest of the hours were put into other parts of the module that were required.

The first scene is a realtime example. Initially I was going to aim to use realtime global illumination (RGI) using enlighten but this was going to take too much of my practical time as the baked times were going to take far too long. So as the fix to this I changed the direction to a more intensive approach of SSGI (screen space global illumination). This has a very heavy impact on performance but provides similar results with far less setup and also wouldn't eat into practical time with long baking times. This scene also makes use of SSAO to provide a more accurate ambient occlusion up close allowing for a lot better depth through the scene.

This second scene takes on the baked approach to this learning contract. This scene is a fully baked example that uses multiple baked lighting sources to illuminate the rooms. There isn't much technically to talk about this scene other than this scene also making use of SSAO and SSR to add more depth. Though with this being a pre computed approach I was able to make use of research I had done into optimising the baking process while also preserving bake quality.

Overall I feel this is a quick attempt and there is a lot of head room for performance adjustments just the time provided for the module wasn't long enough to look into everything with HDRP and graphical optimisations but I am happy with the current results and I will continue to look into HDRP and optimisations and how to create better lighting.

Assets used are linked below:
Dynasty scene - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/asian-dynasty-environment-267161
Mansion scene - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/victorian-mansion-environment-269740