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peter_spy

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Everything posted by peter_spy

  1. peter_spy
    For metals, you'd have to author your cubemap a bit more. If you just added that studio cubemap or envshot made in the game, you need to tint these images with the color of your metal, it's not done automagically. This is where the dst_color blend mode has its advantage I guess.
  2. peter_spy
    None of these solutions is without major flaws, it seems. I try to set up proper diffuse + specular look first, then add cubemap reflections if that's not enough. But to get something similar to a PBR model, we'd probably have to just switch to it.
  3. peter_spy
    That's why I have alpha 1 there, multiplied by parm3. You can set shaderparm3 in the model to make it darker. Should work the same in both 64 and 32 bit, as long as you don't exceed the 0-1 range.
  4. peter_spy
    I'm referring to this setup:
  5. peter_spy
    I meant the cubemap with gl blend mode using alpha, not the color. The color has too many drawbacks and it's unpredictable, as you demonstrated. Even materials with bright diffuse and specular textures get very dark. It will be hard to control the whole thing.
  6. peter_spy
    You can still get similar results with diffuse+normal+specular+masked cubemap then. It just requires a lot more manual tweaking. PBR would be another can of worms with existing assets though. Not sure if there's any good way of making the transition.
  7. peter_spy
    Yeah, but is it worth the effort? Why not have the complete PBR solution anyway, instead of sort-of-trying to mimic it.
  8. peter_spy
    Using detail normalmap as a way to control surface porosity seems like an overkill Especially since blending two normalmaps together (base + detail) is such a hassle on shader level. Having multple and complex stages in the shader increases the amount of times surfaces have to be redrawn, so it's also performance intensive. The only solution I thought of would be to have different cubemaps for different metals, depending on how polished the're meant to be. If I want slightly duller surface, I'd use a blurred generic cubemap with alpha mask. If the metal is polished, I'd switch it to an envshot from a certain location. At this point, it would probably be more efficient to port PBR solution from RBDoom3BFG, so you can control all of this with a single roughness map. Every hacky or convoluted solution increases material authoring time, and I guess most people have neither time nor energy for that.
  9. peter_spy
    There was a discussion about this issue on TTLG at some point, this post articulates my thoughts on it more than I ever could myself:
  10. peter_spy
    I think it is supposed to be working when you want to use an alpha you made from one texture in another texture, like this: As for the cubeMap, vs. cameraCubeMap, remember that those are / were not exactly the same things. CubeMap is used when you project it on convex surfaces, like ingame objects. CameraCubemap is used to project the cubemaps onto concave suraces, like a skybox sphere with faces inverted inwards.
  11. peter_spy
    Nice! And a good case for enabling the new frob. IMO r_newFrob 2 + r_frobOutlinePreset 4 look pretty good
  12. peter_spy
    No it's in TDM 2.12, but it's turned off by default. Look for these cvars in darkmod.cfg: seta r_frobOutlineBlurPasses "2" seta r_frobHighlightColorAddB "0.02" seta r_frobHighlightColorAddG "0.02" seta r_frobHighlightColorAddR "0.02" seta r_frobHighlightColorMulB "0.3" seta r_frobHighlightColorMulG "0.3" seta r_frobHighlightColorMulR "0.3" seta r_frobOutlineExtrusion "-3.0" seta r_frobOutlineColorA "1.0" seta r_frobOutlineColorB "1.0" seta r_frobOutlineColorG "1.0" seta r_frobOutlineColorR "1.0" seta r_frobOutline "0" seta r_frobDepthOffset "0.0005" seta r_frobIgnoreDepth "0" seta r_newFrob "0"
  13. peter_spy
    That makes sense since 64-bit mode lets you use values beyond 0-1 range, but I wouldn't rely on it to get basic things done, like the color of the bottle. It will be hard to get consistent results across multiple models. As for the frob, have you tried switching to the frob outline?
  14. peter_spy
    What does the makealpha do in that stage before specular map? Don't you have to place it before cubemap stage and add maskalpha after the blend mode to make it work? Like this: At least that's the working example I know. Edit: Hmm, looks like that maskalpha keyword is redundant with cubemaps, nothing changes when I delete it Edit 2: source https://modwiki.dhewm3.org/MaskAlpha_(Material_stage_keyword)
  15. peter_spy
    Please let us know if you find a solution that is working with cubemap masks, since perfectly clean and polished surfaces are a rare thing, unfortunately.
  16. peter_spy
    When used with textures, it works like Overlay mode in Photoshop. With "perfect gray" color (rgb 128) color, it does nothing. Higher or lower values either brighten or darken the picture.
  17. peter_spy
    Maybe a new loot pack will do, although that depends on mapper adoption. That wine bottle is one of the worst cases that could use addressing. Other bottles use specularity and are just junk, while the og version looks flat as hell. Also goblets, vases, all those are very inconsistent and it would be great if you could distinguish junk from loot just by looking at it and not remembering that this is "TDM special case".
  18. peter_spy
    Besides, there will have to be some parameters to control parallax mapping I assume. And maybe some optimisation since the effect is expensive.
  19. peter_spy
    Anyway, you have an interesting development there, because my cubemap setup glows in the dark, and I have a shaderParm3 set up in the model to tone it down:
  20. peter_spy
    Here's the effect I'm getting just by changing the blend mode for the cubemap:
  21. peter_spy
    Looks promising, although when I switched my cubemaps to this mode, the whole material went very dark. With proper textures and masks, this would probably require boosting diffuse and specular beyond rgb 1? No problem with 64-bit color range, of course.
  22. peter_spy
    I proposed that a few years ago, but my initiative was dismissed. Also, IIRC any blend mode except diffuse, normal and specular works in an unlit mode. Have you tried these materials in complete darkness? Typical problem with cubemaps is that they shine in the dark.
  23. peter_spy
    Btw. will there be a list of available parameters exposed for use in materials? A dedicated page in the wiki maybe?
  24. peter_spy
    Material-wise, the engine can do mostly what other non-pbr engines could do, like UE3 (with some limitations). The techniques are transferable to some extent. Just because noone was curious enough to try them out, doesn't mean they don't work. Since parallax mapping is pretty expensive in terms of performance, I'd leave that to cases where it really makes a visual difference
  25. peter_spy
    You don't need parallax mapping for making good metal surfaces. Diffuse / normal / specular combo will do, with a cubemap, if a metal is shiny enough. If you need something that might actually be usable with parallax mappping, you could try making some crystals. This is where you need an effect of something being inside a semi transparent and refractive surface, which sounds like a perfect opportunity for parallax mapping. Example:
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