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To those who find CopperCube's graphic engine lacking, here is a neat trick to get to awesomeness.

bracer
Registered User
Quote
2017-04-29 04:34:28

To those who find CopperCube's graphic engine lacking, here is a neat trick to get to awesomeness.
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This technique has been mentioned over and over again in the forum over many years, but I have never seen an actual implementation of it to my satisfaction.

The idea is really very simple:

1: You can FORGET about getting the delicious global Illumination "look" [realistic look] using almost any real time game engine.
Oh they try, some are better than others [Unreal engine and CryEngine is the best in the field] but NONE will be a match to the renders produced by non-real time renderers like Lightwave's Renderer, VRay, Corona, Maxwell, LightCycle, Arnold...etc

2: Do NOT make the silly mistake of baking all the mesh lighting into a single texture, for an interior scene as big as what you are seeing here, even the floor itself though it looks like a single mesh, is actually broken into multiple pieces each recieving 2048 pixels of baked map.
The scene is much much bigger than what the camera can capture at one go because it have a lot of nooks and crannies.

3: Do not use reflective material of any sort in your 3D program of choice when setting up the overall look and feel of your scene, reflections are view angle dependent, it will not look real when baked into texture, and no, making it reflective but simply not baking the reflection during texture baking wouldn't work because if you set up your lighting with the contributive elements of reflection into consideration, you will lost significant overall brightness, hence realism when baking everything else excluding the reflection, the long and short of it is, don't use materials with reflection for now when baking.

4: BREAK UP YOUR MESHES and give them all their own UVM space if possible.
The scene shown consist of 201 unites of meshes but even I don't have the energy to bake all of them individually, depending on the complexity of an area, you may choose to break less of the meshes up at some places compared to others.

5: With proper implementation of just this technique, Coppercube games can be bright, happy, shiny and...REALISTIC !

There is nothing wrong with making horror games, and understandably so, for the genre is kinder to the limitation of light realism in coppercube, but with the techniques explained here, I urge all of you to give the bright happy game genre a chance !

Just make a little effort to spend time learning a real 3D software and how to use their renderers.

YOU ALL CAN DO IT !

Now go !
Make beautiful games ! Make it bright, happy, shiny and Real !

To Niko: Do you see the very subtle Bloom and Glow I added in Post ? Your game's graphic engine will INSTANTLY become 1000 more awesome the minute you implement Bloom and Glow !
(BUT implement exponential Bloom and Glow, not the Linear Gradient Glow, the linear gradient glow looks very fake.)


maged
Registered User
Quote
2017-05-07 19:22:06

how to use the bloom bro ?


crackyourspeaker
Registered User
Quote
2017-05-18 23:48:15

Good to know thanks


Robo
Guest
Quote
2022-10-25 00:55:22

This is excellent advice from 'bracer' but my game relies heavily on dynamic lighting which changes all the time and hence cant use baked lighting.

I would love to dynamically fade in/out baked lighting somehow into the main texture but haven't yet found a way....any ideas ??

Sounds like a shader issue...


VP
Guest
Quote
2022-10-25 07:32:58

wrote:
how to use the bloom bro ?


Scene>PostEffects>Bloom
https://ibb.co/L9vB5KT
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....Or use reshade as coppercube's post-effects disable Anti-aliasing....

https://reshade.me/


VP
Guest
Quote
2022-10-25 07:34:32

Image link didn't work - hopefully this does....
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just_in_case
Moderator
Quote
2022-10-27 03:27:19

@Robo , yes you can definitely use the shader to fade in - fade out the baked lightmaps on the texture, but the lightmaps need to be in the same UV coords as of the original textures. It's really easy to do this, by simply using the second texture slot with baked texture, and then multiplying it with the first texture, you can then fade in or out the second texture. If I remember correctly I had created a similar shader for @hadoken where he wanted to apply second texture as a sticker with alpha transparency. and he further improved it. You can ask him or search the forums if the shader is still lying in there. I don't have that on my HDD anymore, but if you want i can recreate another one for you


Robo
Guest
Quote
2022-10-27 05:22:28

Thanks 'just_in_case' - does using a shader for this mean that it will replace the default CC lighting on the main textures completely ?
I still need to use a torchlight on base textures in my game....


just_in_case
Moderator
Quote
2022-10-27 05:48:56

unfortunately, yes, it will disable the default lighting on the textures.


VP
Guest
Quote
2022-10-27 07:24:23

Could you just the textures to make them fade in/out instead Robo? To give the effect of a fade, use maybe 15 black textures which have been gradually darkened in Gimp, and then layer them as an animation over all the textures in the scene?

Not sure if this would achieve what you;re looking for or not but it wouldn't affect the lighting and (maybe) worth considering as a last resort.


hadoken
Guest
Quote
2022-10-27 14:03:22

@just_in_case & @Robo

Vazahat's perfect working directx shader for blending one decal texture with alpha transparency over another one with directx HLSL can still be found at this location from the forum:

https://ambiera.com/forum.php?t=...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/...


Guest
Guest
Quote
2022-11-01 13:05:40

Thanks for sharing the Shader @Hadoken and @Just-in_case for creating this. This shader is amazing.


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