Lighting and Textures in PE

[Falkon Swiftblade]

By now we've all seen the first in game example of lighting and water and some dynamism that Josh Sawyer mentioned. I have been coming upon several examples of technology used in or for the Unity engine that really take the lighting and textures up several notches from what we've played in the old IE games. Specifically, I've seen real time image based lighting that mimics real world lighting. Its now easy to create lots of textures like marble, brass, glass, metal, or cloth. Seeing as how Sawyer has mentioned we're going to have different hide armor and leathers, etc. I thought it would be appropriate to mimic these textures in game where appropriate.

 

The question I have is, should the game stick to a more cartoon gamey feel, or should we use the available technology to make things more cinematic? My personal preference would be to make it realistic, and then use color and mood to dictate style similar to how the Lord of the Rings was dramatic with its use of light and shadows, but wasn't too CGI, nor too fake. I think from our first peek things are looking pretty solid. How far should we push it? I would like to see characters of this quality if not even a tad more detail, but I realize our characters are also micro machine small which would limit how real do things need to be.

 

 

 

Hunter image by Warren Boonzaaier

 

 

 

[Merlkir]

Josh Sawyer on SA forums:

 

 

 

I don't know the polycount for that area, but it's the village we've been working on for VS. We're rendering using mental ray (from Maya) because it's particularly well-suited to generating all of the render passes we need for occlusion and dynamic lighting. The big time-killer was apparently using image-based lighting on the exteriors. It took a long time (duh), had a tendency to produce odd hot spots, and was strangely inconsistent. We're now using Maya's physical sun and sky for lighting. It looks great, is much faster, and is consistent. We can also tweak the simulated lighting settings to produce different and realistic time of day images. We can then use those images to create LUTs for time of day color grading. On a related note, color grading is really powerful and I hope we can use it for particularly noteworthy events in the game.

The hardware we're using is pretty good but I don't know the specs off the top of my head. We tried distributed rendering using Deadline but we often wound up with stalled slaves or crashes -- ultimately making the theoretical time-savings vanish. We're going to look into using Octane for our final and diffuse renders because Octane is GPU-accelerated. We could build a render machine specifically for those and even if artists shared it, Octane would likely shred through the renders in no time. 1:40 for a full-res render of all passes is acceptable but we're still going to look into ways we can speed it up without losing quality.

BTW, we just had Kaz do some 2D paintover work on a final render for one of our vertical slice dungeons and it looks awesome. We were worried it would be way too time-consuming because he's essentially working with 16x the pixel data that we did in Olden Days. We were also concerned about how the 2D touchups would interact with the dynamic lighting. The answer is: pretty much fine.

 

What caught my eye - the 2d paintovers and how fine they interact with lighting. How does that work? Does the artist also paint a normal map (or any other passes?) while painting in the diffuse details?

[Orogun01]

If they are using Zbrush it may just be a 3D model with render passes.