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TDM Fresnel Mod


nbohr1more

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50 minutes ago, lowenz said:

2.09: https://i.postimg.cc/02Y5VBjD/0.jpg
 

2.09 with fresnel: https://i.postimg.cc/fbrM34qn/1.jpg

 

Rim light "fights" vs SSAO along the 3D models borders so the result is.....strange.

Look at the pipe.

 

(please enlarge the images in 2 different browser tabs)

I hate to admit that from player's perspective the @nbohr1more's mod does "look cool" slightly when you know what to look for, e.g. on the dimly lit roofs at the distance.

OTOH it might be bumming out for programmers to support which I gladly find myself not involved with any more. The question for someone to decide is if the barely visible coolness is worth the support cost. Which again depends on whether this part is isolated from the rest of the code well enough and @nbohr1moreis willing to do all the related routine work in the long term.

But then again I don't personally like the pitch black mapping style common in TDM FM's, so I'm automatically pro on any brightening mod there can be.

OTOH 2 hehe, I was kinda expecting non-physics-strict eye-candies like SSAO to start conflicting each other like this.

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From the content creator perspective, it's already hard, in this non-pbr framework, to get consistent and predictable shading across your models and materials. Introducing another variable onto the mix, that is based on eyeballing the results with assets that don't even use the complete diffuse/specular/normal workflow, looks like just shooting in the dark and making things even harder. But as an option toggle for the players that is off by default – sure, why not.

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50 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:

Yeah, the conflict is to be somewhat expected since both are doing naive view based approximations .

I can try another (reduced) SSAO multiply pass to make it less weird.

Hmm.

Now that I think of it, Fresnel should take precedence over SSAO somehow since the glancing reflection will still somewhat brighten recessed areas.

Time to move where the end of the shader block happens I guess.

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It looks like the fresnel is completely wiping out the SSAO effect along the wooden beams on the right in those recent shots.  It's also washing out a lot of the shadow on the road...most of the shadows, in fact.  There's not a lot of cast shadows in those comparison shots, but they're noticeably fainter in the fresnel version.

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Is there a light source @right (in the sky)?

 

The rim light effect is clear on the wall bricks (not the church ones, the wall ones) @extreme right and it's good. But how it relates to "real" light sources? It must be coherent with that scene lighting information.....

Edited by lowenz

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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29 minutes ago, lowenz said:

Is there a light source @right (in the sky)?

 

The rim light effect is clear on the wall bricks @extreme right and it's good. But how it relates to "real" light sources? It must be coherent with that scene information.....

The presumption is that the ambient is based on available diffuse moonlight in the scene so the fresnel is reflecting more of that back to the player.

Yes, it isn't quite realistic but my aim is to restore visual designs that used the old fresnel effect that did roughly the same thing.

Check out WS4 Warrens here:

https://imgsli.com/NDQ0OTM

If this scene was originally designed in 2.07, it probably would have used bounce lights to compensate for the contrast and depth issues.

With the old ambient, you could reasonably rely on it to do all sorts of things for you.

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Well. Let's put it this way... All our ambient solutions are faked by virtue of mapper control.

The real light sources do not feed the ambient lighting.

So whatever we do now to reconcile realistic ambient shading and the "ambient world light" is going to be incorrect.

I do have a few ideas to improve this thing though...

1) Reduce the brightness at long distances

2) Modulate the shader with the portalsky texture

Ultimately, this was meant to make a few old missions look at least as good as they did on 2.05.

I will probably tone down the effect a little more eventually, but I wanted it to stick out "a little" so that folks would recognize the differences and offer commentary.

( Even with my initial "extreme" screens wesp5 was not sure whether anything changed, so imagine what would have happened if it were toned down? )

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So with this solution you're favoring mappers who use simple lighting, while this will look wrong/more pronounced with more complex setups. If you want a sort of fake GI helper, that should rather be a parametrised entity placeable inside DR, instead of a global solution.

Edited by peter_spy
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By the way, it was a huge surprise to me that Arkane actually used fully dynamic lighting system in Dishonored 2. At the same time, they did have some "in-house indirect lighting system + IBL cubemap network". Maybe that could also be a way to go for TDM?

Here's the presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/UmbraSoftware/umbra-ignite-2015-jrmy-virga-dishonored-2-rendering-engine-architecture-overview-moving-to-multitasking

CC: @cabalistic

 

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Here is a VERY interesting comparison with my latest "toned down WIP version":

William Steele 5 default with no SSAO

ws5_commerce_default.jpg

Now with Just Fresnel:

ws5_commerce_fresnel.jpg

 

Now with NO fresnel but with SSAO REALLY Wide radius ( 128 )

ws5_commerce_ssao256.jpg

 

Now with SSAO and Fresnel:

 

ws5_commerce_fresnel_ssao.jpg

It is interesting that the fresnel almost gives the same look as a wide radius SSAO but has better performance and more clarity. Not lit as nicely though.

Here is the build:

tdm_base01.pk4

This is probably as toned-down as I would go, so I guess this would be a "fresnel low" setting.

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Looks great to me, but I liked it before as well so. If you consider the most recent build essentially a "fresnel-low" setting, would you consider the build prior a "fresnel-medium" then? I haven't tried the new build yet but I quite like the effect, particularly on certain maps, so if there isn't any significant changes other than intensity I may just stay where I'm at. Thanks for all of the work on this.

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How about a "Ambient Light" switch with the choice between "Legacy Look" (fresnel) and "SSAO" ? (and maybe a third one with either)

Edited by lowenz

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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19 hours ago, ate0ate said:

Looks great to me, but I liked it before as well so. If you consider the most recent build essentially a "fresnel-low" setting, would you consider the build prior a "fresnel-medium" then? I haven't tried the new build yet but I quite like the effect, particularly on certain maps, so if there isn't any significant changes other than intensity I may just stay where I'm at. Thanks for all of the work on this.

Yes, roughly. I wanted to wait on feedback but I honestly feel this latest revision is almost too low. It does noticeably improve some scenes and assets though.

Particularly the greek style lady busts that rely exclusively on normal maps for fine detail and have no baked AO.

Now they look like proper ladies in ambient only lighting rather than abstract art.

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18 hours ago, lowenz said:

How about a "Ambient Light" switch with the choice between "Legacy Look" (fresnel) and "SSAO" ? (and maybe a third one with either)

One option that comes to mind is having a purely multiply\filter mode which just darkens the scene according to fresnel.

It would be pretty subtle and would just expand the SSAO model a little. That would naturally be a sub-option of SSAO.

Still, before any of this comes to fruition someone else from the team has to decide it is worthy for inclusion.

I can just commit my changes and add cvars, entity args, etc... and see what people say in the 2.10 beta but it's better to get community feedback here first.

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On 3/16/2021 at 10:40 AM, peter_spy said:

So with this solution you're favoring mappers who use simple lighting, while this will look wrong/more pronounced with more complex setups. If you want a sort of fake GI helper, that should rather be a parametrised entity placeable inside DR, instead of a global solution.

Now that I think of it, when the HDR-Lite feature was added in 1.03 there was a discussion about how adding all these directional effects would impact generic

ambient lighting used for local bounce lights. At the time, the solution was to replace the ambient_world light with texture based brightening and shading while leaving

the standard ambients as is.

As I recall, in 1.08 (when we first used Doom 3 engine sources) @rebb then replaced the texture based ambient with a dedicated ambient shader for all ambient lights so we probably just extended the fresnel and other effects to all ambient lights.

The ambient world was meant to be an "easy button" so that mappers would not need to fuss with lots of ambient lights everywhere so that is why it was given directional attributes

so it follows that we should probably restore this dichotomy and make sure that we even consider removing all directional behavior from the ambients except ambient world.

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I've been playing with the most recent build for a while now and it looks very nice. I do feel the effect is just a bit too subtle for my personal tastes. I play with SSAO on high and max out the AA and Texture Anisotropy (actually the only thing I don't use is sharpening) so I like the contrast of a slightly greater fresnel effect than the current version. I guess it all comes down to personal tastes at this point and I'm very grateful for whichever version you decide to go with.

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Now I have found another deficiency!

The old 1.03 ambient sampled the env/gen cubemap for all specular interactions...

Back to work...

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@peter_spy

If you try out "Return to the City v2" on TDM 1.07, you will see that the golden lions above the fireplace have much better reflection appearance in ambient lighting.

It is matched to the scene color but shows a great deal of complexity compared to the current implementation.

This would explain why the specular in the current ambient feels so frozen. The old ambient had two dynamic view dependent actions, fresnel and cubemap sampling.

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