I enjoy working with emissive materials a lot, so I decided to see how well they would look in a 80's vapourwave scene.
The way they work is in a greyscale matter, the white parts of the texture are the brightest and the black parts show no light at all. The reason I use white is because I can change the colour in Unity to my liking which makes it more efficient if I want to use it multiple times.
The main example being here as I can have both pink and orange whilst only having one texture.
The sun was a struggle to make as it is done separately through exposure, so trying to mix it with a bloom effect to fit the other emissive objects was a pain.
Most of the inspiration of this was obviously vapourwave. however the film Tron also came in to play as it looks very similar to the Grid from the actual game.
Originally I wanted this scene to have glowing mountains, however terrain textures use layers that consist of Diffuse, Normal, and Mask. This is a problem as I could not add a "Emissive" texture to the terrain to make it glow.
I tried to overcome this with fog, but then it ruins the scenes authenticity. It had to be scrapped.
I made the ground elements once, saved and then copied it across the scene. This is because it saves on performance on randomly placing them as well as it wont be a detail that the audience will see.
My next method was to create skyscrapers to simulate a city skyline. As well as being able to use emissive textures, I found this to work a lot better with the cubed environment.
I eventually changed the textures to windows, altered the colours, and created a low poly human to be the centre of the scene. Looking of into the distance at the city.
Notice that the bottom of the buildings cannot be seen because of obstruction, this saves useless rendering by the Reflection Probe.