How to stop super shininess on textures?

[AluminumHaste]

Is there a way to prevent this?

Even with the specular map removed, at high angles the tile texture is very shiny. While the wood texture is not. The only difference between the 2 is the texture itself. I even changed surface type to wood in case that was causing an issue but it didn't help.

Wood texture at acute angle to light source:

 

Tile texture even with specularmap defined.

[peter_spy]

IMO this is fairly normal phenomenon in non-PBR engines. If you have bright diffuse texture, it will contribute to specularity. You check this with e.g. grey vs. full white diffuse, on the same plane and with the same light.

You can counter this by keeping your diffuse texture outputs in certain range, but it will largely depend on how bright your lights are. In general, there is no way to make materials look good under all lighting conditions in a non-PBR engine.

[nbohr1more]

Does the tile texture have a mirror stage or cubemap stage? The glancing angle effect may be amplified by those. That said, while the Ambient Shader does not have a Fresnel effect, the light shader does so you will get some glancing angle amplification for all materials under standard lights.

[AluminumHaste]

Yeah no cubemap.

[Epifire]

I find this is mainly due to only being able to set light color (not actually refining it with an intensity setting). Personally, I've found no specific way to remedy it but I more so just work around it. It's also the no.1 reason I tend to only use spec maps on very smooth surfaces.

While technically a lot more things could probably use a specular map to have more pop, it's my artistic preference. As I prefer some materials to be a subtle base layer and really not attract too much attention.

But without dragging this out, I've seen this even in the most basic material setups. Bloom makes it way worse. It's usually just too much lighting contribution combined with a hard limitation of our shader systems.

[peter_spy]

Btw. unless you're working on glowy bits (light bulbs, etc.) I'd turn off the bloom entirely when testing a material. It's adjustable by players, so you have no control over it. IMO it's more important that your specular hotspot looks right without any bloom in the first place.

[OrbWeaver]

Does the bright area appear to move over the texture as you move the camera around, or does it remain in the same place?

The defining feature of specular lighting is how it varies based on the positions of the viewer, surface and light source. If the bright area appears to move, then this is specular lighting; if it is fixed in place, it is diffuse lighting.

Specular lighting is not defined by brightness. It is possible to have a very bright diffuse texture which will max out to full white under a light source (as in your image), just as it is possible to have a very dull specular texture which is difficult to see even in darkness.

5 minutes ago, Epifire said:

I find this is mainly due to only being able to set light color (not actually refining it with an intensity setting).

From a rendering perspective, there is no real distinction between "intensity" and "color" other than the fact that "intensity" affects RGB channels equally, without changing the apparent hue. There would be no increase in render quality by having a separate intensity value that was tracked and calculated independently of color.

However, recent DarkRadiant versions add a slider into the Light Inspector which allows mappers to vary the brightness of one or more lights without having to use the color chooser or risk changing the hue. This is purely a user convenience feature, and does not unlock any new rendering possibilities (the intensity changes are just baked into the RGB color applied to the light entity).

[nbohr1more]

Still a bit curious, I wonder if the texture is somehow inheriting from another material in one or more of the stages ( all it would take is one of our other core materials defining a mirror or cubemap as a template image with the same name as the target DDS in the affected texture ).

@AluminumHaste please post the results for r_showSurfaceInfo 1 to the thread.

Thank you!

[AluminumHaste]

This is a custom texture that was made by taking like 50 pictures with a DSLR of the tiled floor in my basement. The program then created bumpmap and specularmap along with the diffuse.

I've since toned down the specmap and diffuse, but it's still really shiny in game.

 

Here, try it out.

 

 

 

Just drop the pk4 in your base TDM directory, should show up in darkradiant.

 

 

[AluminumHaste]

Forgot the editor image and fixed material file.

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_FD6GARVdk7EHZUYKngOiBfsJ7H-NrzM/view?usp=sharing

[AluminumHaste]

And bloom does make it way worse, thanks.

Turning that off helped a lot.

[nbohr1more]

Yeah, the behavior here is what we have seen since JC Denton's "HDR-Lite" shaders were introduced.

Once the glancing angles amplify the light response above the rgb threshold for bloom, you get the blow-out. It looks realistic in some scenarios such as near a fireplace or torch but is not quite convincing with area lights or large bright lights whose light center is further away from the surface of the affected material.

Example of the benefit of the effect ( ceiling fresnel effect )  :

I guess the workaround is to darken the specular and diffuse a little further, maybe add a blend filter stage ( faked AO, etc), and maybe add an alpha channel to the specular to tone down the gloss response.

[peter_spy]

22 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

And bloom does make it way worse, thanks.

Turning that off helped a lot.

 

 

Do you have a photo of that floor when lit, at an angle? I think the generated specular map is wrong: the raw stone bits should be more porous, while the orange bits should be smoother and more shiny.

[AluminumHaste]

Download the file I posted

Edit: sorry, misread your post

[AluminumHaste]

56 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

Do you have a photo of that floor when lit, at an angle? I think the generated specular map is wrong: the raw stone bits should be more porous, while the orange bits should be smoother and more shiny.

[AluminumHaste]

Also, in testing I changed the levels in Photoshop for the specular map.

[nbohr1more]

Yes, it looks like the specular might almost need to be inverted so that all the holes and divets have less specular than the broader surface areas. ( not that this will help with the blow-out effect )

[peter_spy]

  

32 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

 

Now, that's a really nice floor!

Here's how I'd do it: https://we.tl/t-clZCfdyxda

I resized textures to 1024 for faster upload, I hope you don't mind.

Tested the whole thing with both player lantern and strong lights, without bloom.

\

Edited February 8, 2023 by peter_spy

[Epifire]

4 hours ago, OrbWeaver said:

From a rendering perspective, there is no real distinction between "intensity" and "color" other than the fact that "intensity" affects RGB channels equally, without changing the apparent hue. There would be no increase in render quality by having a separate intensity value that was tracked and calculated independently of color.

Thanks for the clarification. My understanding of that comes more from a GI usage too, which makes sense as both engines I've used (separate to id4) have some manner of lightmap propagation. id4's system always felt to me, like a wholesale way of modifying the light color. Where in other engines, the intensity seems like an alpha slider against the RGB of the light's coverage.

Having only used the systems (rather than work on them), id4 just feels a tad pickier. I say, "feels" because I only can point to seat-of-the-pants experience from one engine to the other, vs actual hard numbers.

What I notice is that it feels like it's a lot easier to blow up the brightness/saturation levels and that if something looks off, I usually end up needing to tweak the color values as well as the brightness to fix it.

[Epifire]

1 hour ago, peter_spy said:

  

 

Now, that's a really nice floor!

Here's how I'd do it: https://we.tl/t-clZCfdyxda

I resized textures to 1024 for faster upload, I hope you don't mind.

Tested the whole thing with both player lantern and strong lights, without bloom.

\

The spec is basically on point with the original image (for overall tone). Really the only thing standing out to me now is that there's something funky going on with the normal map. The grout work was treated like a ridge, rather than a valley; so I'm assuming that has to do with the way the normal map was generated.

[AluminumHaste]

That's my fault, I stacked multiple copies of it in Photoshop as overlay in Photoshop, as I felt the original generated normal wasn't very deep

[Epifire]

4 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

This is a custom texture that was made by taking like 50 pictures with a DSLR of the tiled floor in my basement. The program then created bumpmap and specularmap along with the diffuse.

I've been interested in getting into Photogrammetry myself but the equipment right now has been a bit cost prohibitive. I'd be keen on hearing more about the process if you care to write about it sometime! 

 

17 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

That's my fault, I stacked multiple copies of it in Photoshop as overlay in Photoshop, as I felt the original generated normal wasn't very deep

I more so pointed it out, as just straight image conversion tends to be a bit iffy on results. Is your capture method able to convert the input images to create a height map? Heightmap is king but If you're not creating the data from the ground up, that's easier said than done.

[AluminumHaste]

I'll have to dig and find out what program I used, this was made 2 years ago, man time flies

[AluminumHaste]

3 hours ago, Epifire said:

I've been interested in getting into Photogrammetry myself but the equipment right now has been a bit cost prohibitive. I'd be keen on hearing more about the process if you care to write about it sometime! 

 

I more so pointed it out, as just straight image conversion tends to be a bit iffy on results. Is your capture method able to convert the input images to create a height map? Heightmap is king but If you're not creating the data from the ground up, that's easier said than done.

 

I can't find or remember the program I used.

What you needed to do was take a picture of some texture, and light it from 4 or more sides. So I used n, ne, e, se, s, sw, w, nw, and brought all those images into the program. It then computed the info from each angle and spit out those textures.

It was a lot of work for 1 texture, and you have to either be very consistent with your picture taking, or use a tripod.

[AluminumHaste]

Found it, Shadermap 4

I'm confusing a couple of different programs that I used. The one where you take multiple images of the subject with lighting from all angles didn't work, there was too much noise.

This was generated from a single image source that was flat diffuse lit.