UE3 Shader to mimic SF4 (WARNING LONG POST!)

seforin

ok Ive been dealing with this on my off time for a while now and I cant take it anymore, ive asked alot of people personal questions online (and thank you for all your support and sorry for being a hassel to you!) But I cant take this anymore

so let me cut to the chase, many of you saw me working on a street fighter character next gen not to long ago.


on my off time between freelances ive been working on him on and off in unreal 3.

my goal was to achieve a faked Street fighter 4 look, which was mostly a flatisky style somewhat semi desaturated look.

A example of it is here





now I was directed to neox's shader tutorial to recreate team fortress style characters in unreal 3 which was in a direction I wanted to go( And neox thanks man that tutorial helped ALOT!)


But ive been running into weird issues I just cant seem to figure out, I figured the culprit to be a few things.

I believe the ambient since I was using a color is acting as a shadow but for some reason its creating blotchy patches on my character as oppose to acting as a faked shadow on his lower points.

So Following the Team fortress shader and modifying points so it wasnt as FLAT or as cell shaded I made a semi hybrid version.

But im running into other issues where asside from the blotchy points the character also gets weird gagged highlight points in him when I rebuild the light.

I have screenshots of everything I mean below along with my current shader....


At this point any help or a step in the right direction is better then no step at all!

(PS - YES I want to do this with a shader in unreal I want to learn shader work!)



(no lights built)



(lights built)





(shader)











(close up of blotchy points I speak of)

Lee3dee

that's pretty sweet! Kovac showed me a tutorial setup that simulated the TF2 shading in ue3.
http://www.moddb.com/games/unreal-tournament-3/tutorials/tf2-shading-in-ut3

Michael Knubben

(Warning if your post is long people probably won't read it and will suggest things you already know)

I hope you get this sorted out, I'd like to see you get there in the end. I don't think the tf2 look is an ideal starting point, though. Have you spoken to Neox personally? He's bound to be able to help you.

Kovac

Lee, that is Neox's tutorial he just has a different Moddb handle. I didn't come across the same issues while dabbling with his tutorial, but get us an image of your tree's bottom box (that has all the lighting/2-sided/etc stuff on it) so we can see what lighting model and other settings you're using. Also, you've obviously imported this as a static mesh, but it's quite apparent that the SF4 char's don't have too much influence from scene lighting, so keep trying without even depending on baking the lighting onto the character.

Also, when importing your textures make sure they're using the appropriate compression settings or artifacting could happen.

JordanW

your shader is hard to read broken up like that, try taking a bunch of screen shots and stitching together in PS so we get one seamless pic of your shader, it'll be easier to see how things hookup.

As far as helping you figure out why your shader is broken I recommend going through each element and see how it's affecting the shader and evaluate if that's what it should be doing. One way to do this would to be go to different parts of the shader and hook that node directly to the custom lighting input and see what the result is. For instance just hook up your phong lighting to the custom lighting input and see if you see an accurate representation, if you got crazy shading then your error's in there. do this for the major elements and it'll help you narrow down what's wrong.

If you're just coping what you see from Neox's tutorial I recommend trying to learn the math/code behind these shaders, it'll help you create them even though you never write any actual code in UE3. I referenced the following books when I was learning shaders.

[ame]http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Vertex-Pixel-Shaders/dp/1584503491/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225379667&sr=8-1[/ame]

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/CgTutorial/cg_tutorial_chapter01.html (this one's free online now!)


I also recommend reading whitepapers and tutorials that nvidia and ati provide. There's already a lot of legwork done one non photorealistic shaders so it'll definitely help to read what other's have done and see what their math is.


Taking a quick look at some things I see wrong

in your rim light box you're doing a dot of the camera vector and what looks like fresnel multiplied by your diffuse...why? Fresnel is already a rimlighting term. Manually creating a rimlighting term would be Dot(Normal,Camera) and would put that in a One Minus and put a power either before or after that to sharpen it.

You're multiplying your Specular calculation by a fresnel component, this means you'll only get specular on the edges of your model (this may be intentional?)


Also, custom lighting doesnt work with static built lighting very well, the lightmaps have shading models built into them which is why you'll get black shadows despite your shader avoiding them.

seforin

I'll upload a higher rez version of the shader later today during lunch,


to iterate on the spec, yes I was figuring only on the edges of this but with a soft ambient (acting as shadows) this could make the spec pop more as oppose on the entire model. But that was more testing then anything else


well heres a question How Do I display this character with this shader correctly in the editor built if static meshes is a bad idea?

JordanW

Characters don't use built lighting, they use dynamic, if all you have is a static mesh of this right now just convert it to a mover.

seforin

movers can be built with lighting in the game? I noticed when I was in the editor all my textures looked like they were washed out and no details were there? I figured I needed to do a build and play in the editor to see it correctly?

seforin

I reuploaded these to my site bigger rez, if I need to make another one let me know.

Bryan Cavett

I did a shader like this recently. Its hard to tell from your shots where the light is coming from but it looks like you might need to clamp your ramp texture. I had to do this. The ramp texture looks like its adding the bright part to the shadow side and wrapping around.. so its getting light to shade back to light if thats makes sense. I had to add a clamp before feeding in the dot product intot the uv's of the ramp texture.

A clamp of 0.1 to 0.9 seemed to work for mine.

Edit: It really helps to test this stuff on a more simple object so you can tell what the lighting is doing.

Edit No. 2: Looks like you can set the texture to clamp instead of wrap when you import it.

seforin

MightyPea wrote: »

(Warning if your post is long people probably won't read it and will suggest things you already know)

I hope you get this sorted out, I'd like to see you get there in the end. I don't think the tf2 look is an ideal starting point, though. Have you spoken to Neox personally? He's bound to be able to help you.

Yea I did he gave me some guidance but Im sure hes a very busy guy so I cant keep pestering him about this stuff

seforin

ok so After some PM's and some AIM's with some members on here and guidance of a programmer at my company on off hours started to go for a more SIMPLISTIC shader to work with


but im running into some bugs, im trying to get this to work in the actual editor itself, where when I play the game and view it in the engine itself but everytime I put the mover in the level it shows up all black?

But in the editor windows the mesh shows up like its suppose to so until I can get it in the editor to test I can not continue testing out the shader to see how its effecting the model...any suggestions?


Thanks in advance (FYI Shaders involve alot more math then im comfortable with this programmer had to bust out a visual calculator and it started to make my head spin)

Bryan Cavett

Your using a static light on a dynamic mover mesh. Hit f4 with the light selected to access the properties. Go into the Light Channel and turn on the dynamic check box for the light.

One other thing... incase your using a skylight in the future, custom lighting doesn't seem to accept lighting from the skylight type light source as far as I know.

Glad your starting from a more simple shader.

Lee3dee

I'd try and enable this also, sometimes when you create a mover out of a staticmesh it goes pure black as you have shown. Just enable the LightEnvironmentComponent



Hope that fixes it.

-Lee

seforin

ok a few updates before this evening is done, along with a few fuck ups I thought were funny I had to share


heres the current shader....I still have yet to add in the spec or anything ...I kept running into the issue that every time I tried to deepen the normals enough, I would lose my nice soft ambient/diffuse look, but every time I darkened it the normals would either artifact with weird black spots or just literally make BLACK points on the normal maps (way to harsh) so I dunno, heres where im at right now suggestions at this point are appreciated..







and the cool mess ups

Neox

i'd definitely ramp the shadin, as right now it's way too smooth if you compare it to SF

ae.

i would love to see your current set-up for this is you have an image also maybe a mini-tutorial as i want to do the same thing.

Junkie_XL

Sorry I'm too lazy to read the whole thread at the moment. That link Lee3dee posted looks like what you want.





Even though no diffuse is showing at this stage, that looks very close to the SF4 screenshot I think. Stop short at that point and see what it looks like with Diffuse.

seforin

*cough*

(points to image in what you are working on section )

I achieved close to what I was working on now Im repainting the diffuse to do justice to this piece.




this is dependant on light in the zone to act as the spec pass and acts as its own darken of line work (outline of the character)

once I paint the diffuse to have nicer shadows highlights etc this will pop ALOT more

AE: are you talking about my old shader to make rainbow bright man ? or neoxs?

ae.

id like to see yur current material set-up in unreal

seforin

some more screens of the current dudley (im still painting him at the moment)






and the shader

pior

Does the shader give you access to the outlines color? It would look great with a dark desaturated red/brown, to complement the skintone!

seforin

pior : it can I just need to play with it a bit more I still need to control the thickness from a distance the thickness is fine but when I get really close Im not liking the black lines.


On a intresting note I found out a way to mask out areas of the outline (well my programming friend explained to me a way but made my head hurt)

If I can find a way to make parts of it black outline/brown outline I think it might add some flavor to this.

I still need to find a way to make my diffuse pop more because right now im painting it up and noticing that my diffuse isnt poping as much as it is when its in 3d's max 100 % self illuminated.

I think I'll be working more on this later. friday or so.


I'll post progress soon (Im still making teeth for this guy + other characters im currently working on for personal/ work)

Neox

the problem with that outline is, that it won't work on flat surfaces, characters should do fine in most cases but other than that there are a lot of problems with this. if you aim for a fixed cameradistance (like in a normal fighting game) then a modelled outline could work the cool thing about those methods is, that you can vary the thickness of the outline more (making it more dynamic), when used with a fresnel with the mesh density and on modelled of course with the model, thats the minus site on a posteffect outline, but the good thing there is, that it works from any distance, is totally tweakable and pretty correct even if you can only create it from zdepth or the imagetexture in unreal

Lamont

Ok Seforin... chased you down across a couple of forums...

Here is a stab at getting the rough shadows on the character. I just need to spend more time to mask out the high-lighted areas and have it multiply better. Don't ask to see shader network, messy as hell. Brain no work good now. Must go to sleep... 7am..

Thanks for the challenge. I will work on it more later today. I think once I mask out the middle bits with decent falloff (with controls for said falloff) , get a better cross hatching source, better texture to use (maybe a better model) and get the rim of the character done it will be damn near close.



If anyone wishes to donate a CLEAN normal mapped character (as little stretching as possible) I'd love to get it so I can refine this. This one was given to me by a buddy, but to go further, I would like something more refined.

seforin

ah ironically I was just rigging up the character today to do some more tests on him , yea I noticed some issues before Via the diffuse not being powerful enough over the said normal map


Played around with it a bit bit didnt post any pictures here (been busy with a art test last few days and the new year and holidays and all that jazz)







Oh yea dude if you were trying to get ahold of me you can always just PM me I read multiple forums so I might have missed which one you were hunting me on (tech artists Im guessing?)