Getting speculars on the shadow sides in Engine. Help!

Defonten

Hi, we have an in-house engine, working on dx11, so we have the main Sun which shines on everything like mountains, and they look great with all crazy normals, ambient occlusion maps etc on the sun lit sides, but shadow or night sides are completely flat as hell apparently because there's no light sources to reveal those normal maps and speculars on PBR materials.

So I was wondering what is the proper way to go around this? What is the right pipeline of having normals and speculars even on dark/shadowy sides. Cos I don't think just adding fake hidden suns/lights all around is true to PBR theory..

Simply put, I want to achive the look of Marmoset Toolbag where I get cool speculars almost all around the surface. Of course I understand that in Toolbag they are not actual lights but hdr map, but anyways. How people achieve this in their engines? What is the theory behind this?

Thanks!!!

Arnage

Most PBR engines actually handle this in a similar way as Toolbag. They generate probes at various locations in your world. Each probe is basically a small HDR cubemap of the surrounding environment, with mipmaps to simulate rough materials. You then blend between these to create the final look.

Additionally screen space reflections are often used as these two methods complement each other well.

Scruples

How is there no light sources, does your universe have no moon? If there's no light sources you should be looking at a black screen. Also I would add another "fake" lightsource coming from the opposite direction of the moon so larger structures get some fake bounce lighting from the ground(no specular on this lightsource). Keep the ambient lighting as low as possible, just enough to offset the occlusion.

Gratuitous screenshot of phantompain

Defonten

Many thanks for the info guys. Yes, we're already implementing a few fake lights which will simulate some bounce light/speculars in areas where there's no light.. I think there's no other way to go, so far.

EarthQuake

HDR cubemaps for ambient diffuse and specular reflections is what you want, it's what Toolbag 2, and most modern engines like UE4, Unity 5, etc use.

ZacD

Are you using sphere reflection capture actors? They should play the roles of HDR cubemaps and adding lighting into the shadows.

Defonten

EQ thanks! We will work in this direction!