TDM Fresnel Mod

[stgatilov]

And yes, tweaking shaders is fast and easy, and has immediate effect, thus there are many people who do that. I believe we also had some external guy recently who did the same in "Want to Help" section.

Maybe we should just add these shader tweaks into addon managers and allow people switch between them as they like? Just like people can install a program (don't remember its name) and add postprocessing like FXAA to any game.

[peter_spy]

I think you mean Reshade. I used it a couple of times, it has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve

Also, maybe this will help to illustrate the problem better:

As you can see with image 2 & 4, the geometric complexity, whether with actual polygons or faked via smooth edges on normalmap, does matter. And I bet when most users think 'fresnel', they mean the last example.

Most TDM geometry is brushes and models textured with simple tiling materials. They won't look like the last example, until they have enough polygons.

[STiFU]

15 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

Also, maybe this will help to illustrate the problem better:

As you can see with image 2 & 4, the geometric complexity, whether with actual polygons or faked via smooth edges on normalmap, does matter. And I bet when most users think 'fresnel', they mean the last example.

Most TDM geometry is brushes and models textured with simple tiling materials. They won't look like the last example, until they have enough polygons.

Hm, I am not sure I follow. Shouldn't the behaviour of the Rim shader be independet of actual geometric complexity and normal map based complexity? If the answer is yes, then brushes should also look fine because the applied material provides geometric complexity.

 

15 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

I think you mean Reshade. I used it a couple of times, it has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve

Reshade is awesome. I use it all the time to improve the visuals of old classics. The Post-Lightmaps-Era games just look so much better with some SSAO...

[peter_spy]

1 hour ago, STiFU said:

Shouldn't the behaviour of the Rim shader be independet of actual geometric complexity and normal map based complexity? If the answer is yes, then brushes should also look fine because the applied material provides geometric complexity.

IIUC, fresnel uses view direction and surface normal vectors. This is a comparison between simple brush cube and one with chamfered edges on geometry, both using the same tiling material:

Brush cube is on the right; in the background you see a cube with chamfered edges. There is a thin line on the bottom of the brush cube, because it matches the normalmap, the mortar part of the bricks. But as soon as I change texture coordinates of the brush:

While the chamfered cube has enough geometry to work with fresnel shader, even if I change texture coordinates:

So it seems to work as described, it needs either geometry normals or details faked on normalmap. I think fresnel in other pre-pbr engines, like UE3, works the same or similar way.

Edited January 27 by peter_spy

[7318]

why not go al the way up and give the ambient light a screen space reflection term, so the fresnel affected pixels would reflect what is behind them (at grazing angles) instead of a static term? this means that if what is behind them is way darker then the fresnel won't reflect anything, and if what is behind is is way lighter then the fresenel would take a portion of that reflected light, i guess you could use the specularity term of every texture to derive how much those fresnel effects do gather from the SSR term.

Edited January 28 by 7318

[nbohr1more]

FYI the 2.12 compliant version is available now that the beta is over:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-212

[lowenz]

Thanks, man!