Blending dynamic objects into a baked scene

Great work on your gallery, controls are very intuitive and overall concept is very well executed, congrats.

Regarding to “better blend in” unlit artwork and a shadow/light baked scene:

  • Light probes can help you in modulating the incoming light. You are right in that creating env maps for each room will better fit the irradiance contribution, but you will have to link the artwork and the corresponding envmap by hand as there is no mechanism -yet- to asign it automatically. Also, please keep in mind that envmaps were created for “distant” surroundings, not nearby walls; a simple solution for this is to use a blurred version of your maps (that don’t break the illusion), and to distribute them in strategic positions:

  • Likewise, you would definitely would improve the effect by not only taking the light contribution into account but also the shadow. In the following image, you can see the paintings are just too bright -almost like being projected onto the walls. One of the key principles of PBR is energy conservation, meaning that reflected light by any surface cannot be more than incoming light. In order to solve it, you could generate “shadow maps” during baking process, that multiplied by the artwork shader should keep the brightness within plausible values