Stylized Baseball Field (Unity)

I’d say this lone screenshot (thanks, hard drive crash) shows off my world-building, shader work, and lighting skills circa 2019. Honestly, I can’t even remember what this was for anymore, or if it was an actual project or client.

This shot comes from a now-legacy version of Unity, using Unity’s original Post Processing Stack v2, which gave me some solid HDR effects despite the limitations of Unity’s old standard pipeline.

I aimed for a blend of stylized and realistic lighting to help the game stand out. Alongside lighting and post-processing, I used custom normals for all the foliage. By “custom,” I mean ditching tangent normals for leaves and grass in favor of a world-space approach. This way, each leaf and blade of grass caught light evenly, regardless of position, leaving dynamic shadows to handle the rest. Back then, I didn’t know about the trick of transferring custom normals from one mesh to another, like shading a cluster of leaves with the normals of a sphere.

If you’re somehow still awake, check out this dev video I made on Postal 4’s vegetation, it will show some of my same process there. The foliage looked like sandpaper before I worked my magic.

Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/5h46NS6zhdA?si=eoCqxRpqAuo39evu