Tracker 3881: Cubemap Lighting Beta

[VanishedOne]

I like the sound of zone-based control.

 

My impression of the non-ambient cubicLight examples in the demo:

 

grate6 - works.

cubelightCube - nothing visible. Alpha channel problem?

cubesheen - nothing visible. In an image editor it does appear to have an alpha channel that's neither wholly black nor wholly white, as per Spooks's post above.

[nbohr1more]

I'll go back over the materials.

 

Rules:

 

1) ambientCubicLight = no alpha channel. Defaults to noshadows (I believe you can override with forceShadows)

 

2) cubicLight = must contain alpha. Looks for pointlight or projected designation in light entity.

 

3) (Both) cubemap = _NZ convention, cameraCubeMap = _up convention

[VanishedOne]

Ah, I can see something with cubesheen if I switch from omni to projected mode. Edit: also with cubelightCube.

 

cubelightCube projected onto a wall looks like this:

The edges of the projection are clipped in a way that changes abruptly as I move around.

Edited September 26, 2016 by VanishedOne

[Spooks]

I've been disappointed in the lack of good cube map making programs out on the net, making new cube map generic lights is going to be harder than it should be unless you want to mess a lot with Photoshop and a 3D modelling program, which I don't. I've an idea about how I could make some in-TDM, since I'm not going to get to it any time soon I'll share it: You could make a cube/patch sphere with a dev grey texture and stand inside it, then put normal lights to illuminate the walls, then take an env_shot and you have a generic looking cube map.

 

I converted one of the lamp textures to a cube map some time ago but I've been busy and cba to make it look better. I wanted to just make it as an example of the improvement of a cubemap over regular lights, so I should probably post the example already.

 

 

The cubelight looks brighter because 1) it's shittily made as I said and 2) it's a bigger light radius. You can definitely see the improvement though.

[VanishedOne]

Is this intended behaviour?

 

 

The ambient cubic light is strongly brightening the metallic and glassy surfaces (something to do with specularity?), whereas the ground (textures/darkmod/stone/cobblestones/blocks_mixedsize02_multicolour_dirty) is barely visible where the 'sun' parallel light doesn't hit it. The ordinary lights/ambientlightnfo brightens the scene in general, with the lampost keeping its dark diffuse colouring.

Edited October 9, 2016 by VanishedOne

[nbohr1more]

The specular is an environmental reflection as well. You can use the nospecular argument on the light entity to disable that.

 

It may be worthwhile to explore somehow removing\replacing that behavior but I think this may be better once I implement a way to

add arbitrary per-material "custom lights".

 

After playing with Biker's Caduceus map, I think I'm gonna recheck whether the "light affects backsides" is correct. I think the

use case means it should default there.

[VanishedOne]

nospecular does get rid of the glowing metal and windows. Though _color also seems to play a role: at ambient_world's default it's as though there's a fog over the scene (there's still a red tint on the windows) which is gone in brighter light (e.g. the statues even seem to get darker).

 

Edited October 10, 2016 by VanishedOne

[nbohr1more]

I'll probably take one last crack at getting _color to work properly. As it currently stands, the shader takes

the color and uses it as a power factor to saturate the result of the previous operations. I'll try reverting back

to the magic number the shader shipped with and see if I can inject the color operation at another spot.

 

Per my previous comment, the backsides behavior is already properly set on the code side so no need to do work there at least.

[nbohr1more]

Here are some updated glprogs.

 

They should work better with light color args.

 

glprogs_new.zip.txt

[VanishedOne]

The colour indeed seems more controllable now.

 

Diffuse lighting for the ambient samples now remains pretty dark even at _white. (Whereas the non-ambient grate6 seems to be behaving like a normal light colour-wise.) For TDM's largely nocturnal settings that's not necessarily a huge problem, except that the same light then becomes very bright if enhanced ambient lighting is turned off. Specular lighting on the ambients, if left enabled, always has a powerful glow-in-the-dark look compared to diffuse, even at low _color.

 

Cubic ambient only, with specularity (the highlights on the wooden counter look pretty bad since the diffuse is so weak):

 

 

Comparison shot with the player lantern on:

 

 

Comparison shot with specularity off (note the mid-level light gem even though it's a very dark shot):

 

 

Cubic ambient (with specularity on) at _white, under enhanced and simple ambient settings (note the effect on the light gem too):

 

Edited November 7, 2016 by VanishedOne

[Spooks]

The cubegrate6 projected light no longer works with these new glprogs. Can anyone else confirm?

 

edit: sorry, deleted some files on my end, it's there still.

 

Otherwise it definetely looks better now, but besides the Simple Rendering update VO mentioned, I find it weird how the interaction works with specular off. In addition, several of the prefab lights don't work, like cubegradient f.i.

Edited November 12, 2016 by Spooks

[nbohr1more]

Well, the issue with the simple ambient is a universal one. If your ambient world has a complex light texture rather than a no falloff texture it won't match the simple ambient. If you use the cubic ambient as your ambient world light you'll need to decide how to mitigate that (eg. Custom materials with less ambient brightening, etc) or warn players that the mission only works with the Enhance Ambient mode.

 

I think the oddness of the specular highlighting can be improved by changing the light ceter location. It seems that the shader was designed with little HL2 style probes everywhere so a big world sized ambient is going to cause problems.

[VanishedOne]

I've checked against the previous glprogs and the new revision definitely produces a darker look in places: I've got walls of textures/darkmod/stone/brick/blocks_sandstone01_bluegrey that were fairly bright with a "_color" "1 1 1" cubesky in previous revisions, but are now pretty dark even when close to the light centre. (The price of improved _color handling?) But yes, I had forgotten to check falloff.

 

It looks as though the "falloff" spawnarg doesn't work here; are cubic nfo ambients impossible then?

Edited November 12, 2016 by VanishedOne

[nbohr1more]

I've checked against the previous glprogs and the new revision definitely produces a darker look in places: I've got walls of textures/darkmod/stone/brick/blocks_sandstone01_bluegrey that were fairly bright with a "_color" "1 1 1" cubesky in previous revisions, but are now pretty dark even when close to the light centre. (The price of improved _color handling?) But yes, I had forgotten to check falloff.

 

It looks as though the "falloff" spawnarg doesn't work here; are cubic nfo ambients impossible then?

 

The shader hard-codes spherical falloff for standard lights. For the cubic ambient, you need to add falloff 0 to the light entity for it to behave properly.

 

As for allowing a falloff texture? Someone with more ARB shader experience than me would need to add that feature.

[nbohr1more]

I've been disappointed in the lack of good cube map making programs out on the net, making new cube map generic lights is going to be harder than it should be unless you want to mess a lot with Photoshop and a 3D modelling program, which I don't. I've an idea about how I could make some in-TDM, since I'm not going to get to it any time soon I'll share it: You could make a cube/patch sphere with a dev grey texture and stand inside it, then put normal lights to illuminate the walls, then take an env_shot and you have a generic looking cube map.

 

I converted one of the lamp textures to a cube map some time ago but I've been busy and cba to make it look better. I wanted to just make it as an example of the improvement of a cubemap over regular lights, so I should probably post the example already.

 

 

The cubelight looks brighter because 1) it's shittily made as I said and 2) it's a bigger light radius. You can definitely see the improvement though.

 

Could you supply your latest textures for this? I'd like to tinker a bit and see if this can be a demo asset for 2.05.

[VanishedOne]

For the cubic ambient, you need to add falloff 0 to the light entity for it to behave properly.

Like I said, I tried the "falloff" spawnarg and I'm seeing no apparent effect:

 

[nbohr1more]

Thanks. I'll try to see if there's anything more I can adjust here.

[Spooks]

Here you are and the material definition:

lights.zip.txt

lights/cubic/tdm_lampshade_cubic
{

	cubicLight
	qer_editorimage		env/lights/test_up
	{
		forceHighQuality
		cameraCubeMap	env/lights/test
		colored
		zeroClamp
	}


}

[nbohr1more]

Hmm. Since falloff is not controllable other than sizing the light, the use of the scale keyword might help here.

 

1) Shrink the light radius a bit

2) Scale the projection texture up:

 

 

 
lights/cubic/tdm_lampshade_cubic
{

    cubicLight
    qer_editorimage        env/lights/test_up
    {
        forceHighQuality
        cameraCubeMap    env/lights/test
        scale 0.7, 0.7
        colored
        zeroClamp
    }


}
 

[Spooks]

I need somebody to check whether or not the current cubic light images have corrupted artifacts when in-game. Just make a light with lights/cubic/cubegrate6 as its texture and check if it looks corrupted in-game. Your Interaction Shader must be set to Enhanced. Either something went really bad in the last small update or some of my files are corrupted...

[nbohr1more]

I did test spawning atdm:lamp_desk_cubic last night and it worked as expected.

 

I'll try testing the cubegrate6 texture tonight if I get a chance.

[Spooks]

The glitch happens with all the cubic lights on my end. I thought it was ReShade (again), but it happens even with it removed.

 

Here's a video of how it looks:

 

[nbohr1more]

Oh no. This looks like a more mild version of how the latest Nvidia drivers broke Sikkmod shaders.

 

What OS and driver version are you currently running?

 

(I'm currently on Windows 10 with the Creators Edition update and the latest hotfix drivers.)

[Spooks]

Yeeah, it was a sinking suspicion that the latest Nvidia drivers were the culprit. Well I'm on Windows 7 and 378.92.

[nbohr1more]

Hmm, I recall the last acclaimed nvidia version was 381.65.

 

I will note that I didn't see this artifact on 381.78.