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Arcturus

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Arcturus last won the day on September 8

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  1. Arcturus
    I am in the open in the direct light of the street lamp, not ambient light, yet the light gem is black. I was wondering whether it's supposed to be like that. Plus the NPCs have sudden urge to run down the stairs where they get stuck by wonky path finding.
  2. Arcturus
    @MirceaKitsuneI suspected that since the mission has a lighter tone the author decreased the difficulty level. The video was shot on medium difficulty I believe.
  3. Arcturus
    It's a fun premise. I played version 2 in Darkmod 2.12: there's a missing door / window model in two places: Guards loose me very quickly. The radius of that light doesn't seem to match the visuals. Something doesn't seem right.
  4. Arcturus
    Turns out in Unreal Engine custom cubemaps in 'Reflection Capture' probes and in the Post Process volume don't work the same way at all. The first one affects the glossy reflections only, the latter affects both glossy and diffuse reflections. Here's how different cubemaps affect both: Now I'm back to thinking that a single ambient cubemap + screen space reflections + soft enough lights might be just enough to have decent glossy reflections. In Unreal point lights have a radius which when increased makes shadows softer. But there's also a separate setting called "Soft Source Radius" that makes lights bigger in reflections. I managed to load custom cubemap files into Unreal. They simply have to be in .hdr format. I used a simple gradient: Heavy screenshots below:
  5. Arcturus
    Having said all that. While having one cubemap image for the reflections would work, having one strength for the entire map won't. The value would somehow have to be tied to the values of lights in the locations.
  6. Arcturus
    Some more tests in Unreal Engine. There is one point light in the room with a non-zero radius for soft shadow. There's one 'sphere reflection capture' probe. I alternated between captured cubemap reflection and some generic outdoor 360° scene from UE5 library. I couldn't figure out how to upload my own. Reflection probe had to be directly above the table, otherwise the captured light looked incorrect. The 'generic' cubemap can be placed wherever. An ordinary probe can be set up to use a custom cubemap, or it can be done in the 'PostProcessVolume' - and that's how I did it. Screen space ambient occlusion is, I think, on - on all screenshots. Screen space global illumination is tagged as a beta feature in UE5. Recently Blender's Eevee engine got SSGI too. I used Darkmod assets, except for those diamonds. Below is 27 images from imgur.com:
  7. Arcturus
    The ASE importer doesn't work with Blender 4 series nor Blender 3.6. It works in 2.83.9. In newer versions the error message is KeyError: 'bpy_prop_collection[key]: key "Color" not found'
  8. Arcturus
    Since most Darkmod missions use global ambient light, you could have a one global cubemap for the entire mission. Unreal has a small selection of generic cubemaps. Here you can see how they are being reflected in all of the glossy materials. The reflections are some generic 360° images that have nothing to do with the actual scene, but it still looks nice. No probes or light baking required.
  9. Arcturus
    Here's Unreal Engine with screen space reflections only. No 'reflection capture' (cubemap reflections). It looks ok as long as the lights are sufficiently soft. Zero size point lights will not get reflected in the shiny metal.
  10. Arcturus
    We can think of adhering to some standardized material table or we can take a look at textures in some latest games for reference when it comes to color. My assumption though is that we can't remake the assets and have to reuse as much as possible.
  11. Arcturus
    One possible path would be to invert all the specularmaps, change them to greyscale (some are in color), and crank the levels almost to the maximum: This way you end up with roughness levels closer to what you would expect. With the inversion of those maps connected to metalness sockets: Skin has a specularmap so it ends up being slightly metallic. There are material parameters in Darkmod like "skin" that perhaps could be excluded. Another problem is as I said that color of metals in diffusemaps is a bit too dark.
  12. Arcturus
    @nbohr1more@STiFU In real world the difference in appearance comes from the difference in electric conductivity. Polished metals are mirrors: Modern mirrors are made by coating glass surface with aluminum or silver. James Webb space telescope uses gold. Whereas if you set metalness to zero you get a ceramic looking material: In principle specularmaps in Dark Mod should be equivalent to inverted roughness. The more white the spularmap values are the less rough the surface should be. In practice the specular effect in Darkmod was considered so strong, that most specularmaps were kept in the 0-0.5 range. Typically it's mostly metals that have specularmaps in Darkmod, but there are exeptions like the skin of NPCs. In the priesttop_s.dds for example, only metal parts have specularity, leather belt is black. All values are kept from zero to about 33% of white. Demonstration with a different lighting that shows the difference better. All materials with roughness 0: With specularmaps connected to roughness it looks practically the same: With inverted (in GIMP) specularmaps it's very rough looking: And with all materials set to 0.7:
  13. Arcturus
    @STiFU Here's Unreal Engine 5 with just normalmaps plus diffusemaps connected to 'color'. Metalness is set to zero and roughness is set to 0.7 on all materials. It would look pretty similar to current Darkmod, except for the missing additional specularity on metal parts.
  14. Arcturus
    @STiFUFully automatic conversion won't be possible. Closest you can get are the generic, tiling sets like the textures/darkmod/stone or wood. And that's because roughness and metalness in those cases can be defined by a single number. Just slap a metalness as a zero and roughness as something like 0.7 and it will be good enough. Later if you want to be fancy you can think about tweaking it further. Bigger problem are textures that combine different types of materials, e.g. metals with non metals, like many of the prop and character textures do. Using existing specularmaps might be helpful, but not always. I was for example able to utilize the priestbottom_s.dds specularmap: But I had to crank up the contrast in order to make the metalness and roughness maps: In the case of priesttop_s.dds specularmap however, the original texture has this noise that makes it difficult to use: That's why some manual work was involved in order to make the metalness nad roughness maps: That's why I wonder if there are original PSD files in the repository somewhere. Colors in general will need to be tweaked but metals especially. In Darkmod metals are generally dark with a bright specularmap added on top. Here's original diffusemap (I'm compressing to .jpg for the forum, btw): Here's the map in my demo. Gold is much brighter and more saturated: Parts of those textures are missing in my version, because different character models share some of the textures and here you see only parts used by the priest model. We probably should take a look how the big boys in the industry are doing it. Some basic palette can be created as reference for things like shiny steel, gold, cast iron, copper, skin. Modern engines still use normalmaps. You would need heightmaps if you wanted to implement displacement or parallax occlusion mapping, but those are nice to have not mandatory. Sketchfab has 'model inspector' where all the textures can be seen:
  15. Arcturus
    @JetrellThanks. He still has shadowmesh sticking from his ass as he moves that needs fixing. I've been thinking, since we're now living in the future we might use AI to create masks for us. I tried the 'Segment Anything' extension in Stable Diffusion using the AI model developed by Meta. There are also models from other laboratories to choose from. It has a range of settings, some of which didn't work for me at all, some worked poorly, and some that work quite well. Here's a best case scenario where it does a pretty good job at isolating different parts of the image: There's also an option called 'Image Layout' that spits out separate image files for every detected feature. Those could be loaded for example into Krita as selection layers. Of course it's no use for a more intricate details, especially that I'm using compressed .dds files which have additional noise.
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