Getting "next gen" weapons to look good when facing away from the light

Racer445

On the few "next gen" type weapons I have created, all of them look fairly decent when in the light which brings out the specular map I created. When not in the light, however, the weapons look very flat, stony, and the materials read entirely different from when it had heavy specular lighting on it.

I studied various weapons from modern games, such as COD4, and noticed that the weapons look good even when not in the light. After looking at the diffuse maps however, I noticed that there was a lot of painted on lighting.

Being from the CS customization scene I used to paint all my lighting by hand on the diffuse map. When I began doing "next gen" items I was told not to paint any on at all. Currently I only bake AO maps and apply them to my diffuse and specular maps. I have tried to bake a small amount of ambient lighting using a ground plane, skylight, and light tracer, but with mediocre results.

So being that no diffuse lighting often creates a flat looking weapon when not under heavy lighting, and lots of diffuse lighting can mess up your dynamic lighting, I'm guessing some sort of hybrid method is best? Your thoughts on this subject?

hyrumark

I notice that in a lot of games that take place mostly in darkly lit areas, like Doom or the Condemned series, where all sources of light are from the engine, that the diffuse maps have zero painted in lighting. Since 99% of the time the weapon is either going to be "lit" or in total darkness.

But other games that take place in brighter outdoor settings, like Half Life or Dark Messiah, the diffuse maps have much more painted in lighting, and really only use the normal/spec maps for some gritty surface detail.

So maybe it just depends on the type of game and setting?

MoP

Depends how the engine is doing ambient lighting, I guess.
If you have no ambient lights to catch the specular (eg. just a constant ambient level, no actual highlight points) then it will always look flat.

Eric Chadwick

If you use a diffusely convolved cube map, you can get pretty nice results, and it's pretty cheap performance-wise. For the best results, you should blend between different cubes as the player moves between differently-lit areas.

http://wiki.polycount.net/Diffusely_Convolved_Cube_Map

woogity

try giving your prop a 3 point lighting scheme that makes it look decent from every angle and bake out your lights to it that way it will still gain light color and shadow detail from the in game environment, and it will also have a bit more intrest in the dark.

cw

what erik says about the ambient cube map is bang on.

another thing which can be nice but should be used with caution is a subtle rimlight effect (if you're using a realtime shader) so that geometry which is very perpendicular to the viewing angle gets a slight colour to it. Also if your surface is metallic or otherwise reflective is there any cubemap type reflecty stuff going on?

fiddle about with the max shader which has been posted here before and you will be able to try out some of this stuff directly. It can help loads with the sense of materiality across the model.

good luck!

thomasp

there was a lot of crap being told when stuff was called "next gen". things are definitely not evolved enough to trust the machine to handle things well. i regularly paint in highlights and shadows, just not as strong as we used to do it in the pre-pixelshader era. combined with a shader, reflection, (subtle) rimlight, etc it tends to work for most of the screen time.
AO on it's own looks pretty damn dead imo.

something else that would help is a permanent light rig around assets to provide specular et al. stuff tends to look incredibly dull if you resort to GI alone. but then that's old fashioned cheating and in this generation we don't need to anymore, right?

Brice Vandemoortele

I think the lack of shading when facing away from the light shouldn't be handled by artists. If it looks good when directly lit there's no reason to modify the asset. Baking a points light lighting will probably interfere with the dynamic ingame lighting and be confusing. The rendering has to handle both situations (lit/shaded) with the same level of quality. And it's pretty easy nowadays. Anything more advanced than a constant ambient value will do the trick. As mentioned by Eric ambient cube map is pretty cool. The cheaper hemispheric ambient (defining a value for the sky and the ground with a linear interpolation) gives good results.
Cubemap reflection (modulated by the spec map and/or a fresnel term) is a pretty efficient way to get rid of the dull look and adds interesting shades to the specular contribution.
You can combine those effects to drive the overall art style. I think rim quickly gives surreal or cartoony look. Using a fresnel term the cubemap will be less intense in the center and outline the silhouette as well, if you aim for more realism. Phong specular will tend to flatten when going behind the object and create an additional rim effect.
Which software are you using?

SHEPEIRO

thomasp wrote: »

there was a lot of crap being told when stuff was called "next gen". things are definitely not evolved enough to trust the machine to handle things well. i regularly paint in highlights and shadows, just not as strong as we used to do it in the pre-pixelshader era. combined with a shader, reflection, (subtle) rimlight, etc it tends to work for most of the screen time.
AO on it's own looks pretty damn dead imo.

something else that would help is a permanent light rig around assets to provide specular et al. stuff tends to look incredibly dull if you resort to GI alone. but then that's old fashioned cheating and in this generation we don't need to anymore, right?

know what your saying but i think this is very dependant on engine, it quite often looks worse IMO, when you have two conflicting lighting, even if one is toned down. the blurred ref. map is probably the best solution.

another thing that you can do is give your ambient lighting some directionality, by adding a couple of subtle direction lights that cast no shadows, so there is always a little bit of normal map working