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Sexy Lighting for your creations. The secret sauce.


Skree000

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on the contrary, if level designers can setup their environmental lighting conditions to emulate the fundamental theories I outlined, similar results are definitely possible.

 

The renders shown above were created simply using lighting techniques that game engines do actually employ. Ray traced and shadowmap lighting is nothing exotic :)

 

 

The trick is setting up your lighting very carefully to create such conditions. Mind you, an entire level cannot have similar lighting conditions unless you really 'fake it' by placing directionals inside/underneath the ground plane and outside the sky to simulate a permanent lighting environment.

 

Rim lighting is achieved in realtime through the use of a procedural 'fresnel' effect used on shaders. Fresnel or 'falloff' creates a 'glow' around portions of a model which face away from the viewers direction. This sort of shader was popularized in the game Mario Galaxy for the Wii.

 

anyways, without a fresnel shader, rim lighting relies on situational lights, and is very view-dependant.... but it can still show up in gameplay.

dont take my word for it, check out this awesome screenshot by Ogramirad...

 

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/217344-1237091820.jpg

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faogen doesnt let me save my stuff in the demo :(

 

anyway doesnt the HDR or Bloom shader do somin like that fresel thing you talk about?

 

also AO and all the other stuff you can render to texture has the big disadvantage that you cant copy paste the mapping of an object part to another to save uv space as each needs its own spot... well you can try but as AO and the like render somekind of shadows those would be at the wrong spot if you did and therefore is only applyable in few situations except you use much bigger or much more textures per model...

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faogen doesnt let me save my stuff in the demo :(

 

anyway doesnt the HDR or Bloom shader do somin like that fresel thing you talk about?

 

also AO and all the other stuff you can render to texture has the big disadvantage that you cant copy paste the mapping of an object part to another to save uv space as each needs its own spot... well you can try but as AO and the like render somekind of shadows those would be at the wrong spot if you did and therefore is only applyable in few situations except you use much bigger or much more textures per model...

 

yes what you are describing is the phenomena of being unable to 'atlas-map' on a tiling-textured object. (atlas map as in, each pixel on the texture has a unique location on the model and no UVs are overlapping or reused.

 

This can be handled with very careful UV planning and positioning, you can still get AO but you have to be smart about how you unwrap your model so the shadows dont fall in bad places :)

 

 

As far as the fresnel goes, its used very scarcely in todays game titles because it does add significant math to each frame to be rendered. Gears of War has it though... its pretty noticeable. Fallout3 does not use this type of shader, I dont believe the engine supports it atm. Looks like only has support for basic shaders.

 

in Faogen, if you want to save your ao map, make it fullscreen and take a Ctrl-shift-prntscreen then paste in photoshop :) Its a ghetto workaround, but meh =P

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