#741 @Felix:

That is some beautiful work!

The daytime shots with just the dirt road almost reminds me of where I used to live in TX! Well, maybe 10 minutes out from where I lived :p.

Looks good!

#742 I have blogged about Re-Spawn a couple of times and the Game Flow technology, but haven't yet posted here, so here goes:

#743 Finally got some good results out of scatter sky :)

#744 BeamNG.drive; we just updated to the latest T3d so I did some testing with the new specular options, makes a convincing wet material in my opinion:

#745 Looks Great Sam, What new specular options are their in the new build? I may have missed that..

#746 @Kory: There is now "Specular" which controls the hardness and "Spec strength" which does the overal power. We're on T3d 3.51 I think now.

#747 @Sam, is that opinion available within the road/path editor, or is there another way...Just curious, because I love what you guys did with the roads and I would love to have the same look or something close :)

#748 @Kory: it's just a new setting next to the old specular slider, available for all materials that use the material editor afaik (so roads, shapes, decals as well iirc). Info here http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21032

You can take a look at our materials and textures in the editor; it's all open. The road in the pic is just a 512x512 with diffuse, spec and normals with the specular hardness turned right up to look wet/muddy (not super visible there though).

#749 Looks awesome Sam! :D

#750 Those are some crazy 3D renderings,you have produced and would like see more from you,also would like to know about the whole process in Torque 3D,As this is new to us.

#751 Important rule: Always use heavy HDR and specular and other fancy postfx if you have.

#752 In my quest to have decent looking character models I've been working on some lighting tweaks.

Here's a simple rimlight effect integrated into shaderGen and the material editor. Very useful for organic objects like cloth, rocks and solid foliage:



WebM of it in effect.

I've also changed the ambient term from this:



to this:



Allowing for much better (as opposed to none) normal mapped lighting in shaded areas (Plus it still works correctly with scattersky/time of day settings since the values are generated using the default ambient value):




Now to make pants for the pantsless man!

#753

That's FANTABULOUS!

#754 Felix, do either of these two effects have much of a hit on performance?

#755 They should be fairly cheap but then again I am not an expert on shader performance. Rim lighting is one texture lookup for the mask (using diffuse alpha right now) plus one dot product and smoothstep. It's worth noting that this effect doesn't take normal mapping into account but I'm looking into that.

Ambient lighting calculation is a lot of multiplications and some lerps. Here's the code if you wanna try it out for yourself:

In vectorLightP.hlsl, add

uniform float4x4 eyeMat,

to the main parameters, then replace

float4 addToResult = lightAmbient;

with

// Pseudo-cubemap ambient term
   float ambientBrightness = (float)lightAmbient;
   float3 worldNormal = normalize(mul(eyeMat, normal)).xyz;	// World space normals
   float ambientContrast = 0.5;
   float4 upAmbient = lerp( 1 - lightAmbient * 0.65, lightAmbient, 1-ambientBrightness*ambientContrast ); // Sky ambience
   float4 lightAmbientTwoTone = lerp( lightAmbient * 0.8 , upAmbient , worldNormal.b ); // Use world normal up channel to lerp between the two
   float4 addToResult = lightAmbientTwoTone + dotNL * lightColor * ambientBrightness * 0.25; // We softly add the sun lighting even in shadowed areas for some directional ambience

#756 Felix, that is some good looking art.. Is there away to put in a request to add the effect or enchantments into the SC so maybe the improvement could make it into an official release?
Also I have a realistic skin shader that would be great for you character models...Again Nice looking model!!!

#757 I'm not really sure how to go about that but I would gladly share my changes if people are interested!

I'm also doing a major overhaul on how cubemaps are handled by shaderGen.
Combined with rim lighting it makes for pretty nice metal materials:



Currently working on trying to add normal mapping to the cubemap reflection.

#758 That's almost PBS quality great job!!!
Yes if you can please share it with the SC I'm sure it would make for a great improvement over the way things are done now :)

#759
Does not appear to have any noticeable hit on performance. Nice! :)

#760 Nice! I find that there's a tradeoff with having high contrast in the ambient term. On one hand it makes individual objects look really good when in shade, however larger stuff like walls and structures generally look better with less contrast.

Also here's some pants to showcase the new rimlighting: