koobas.hobune.stream
Spherical Light for Solar System Illumination
I am building a gravity simulation, with procedural planets and stars. I would like for the stars, to realistically illuminate the planets.
I have two problems:
would need a spherical light, to account for the light hitting the planet when the center of the star is occluded by the planet's surface.
Because the distances are very large, I have problems with either having too much or too little light, due to light falloff.
To solve the first problem I started generating a sphere of point lights. This somewhat fixes the first problem, but at the cost of generating a lot of lights, which is not ideal.
Is there any way to create a spherical light and to either implement a custom light falloff or handle the vast lighting differences?
It might help to look at the problem the other way around and think about how your planet surfaces react to light. This would lead you to delving into the Shader Graph functions to create custom surface shaders. Using this approach, you might be able to simulate the light reactions you need in a more performant way than using complex lighting.
