Hi all

It is really cool now that reflections are generated from the terrain and skybox being used in our level. Great work @Preben I presume

It is also cool that we can make the sun match our skybox suns reflection on entity surfaces!

Here is an example using one of my Toonland Skies before adjusting the skyspec settings.



And this after messing with skyspec settings.



My question is can we adjust the intensity of the sun in the reflection? I would like it to be less intense in the reflection, I played with the sunstrength setting but seams to do nothing....

Reliquia....

Yes I am curious of your question also just out of interests sake. Keep up the great work.

You can change setting in the skyspec.txt file that is in every skyspec folder.
;CleveBla
;SUNLIGHT DIRECTION VECTOR
SunDirection = 25,5,25
;SUNLIGHT STRENGH MULTIPLIER (DEFAULT 100)
SunStrength = 25
;SUN COLOR (RGB)
SunColor = 250,75,30
;SUN ROTATION
SunRotation = 30
;SKYSCROLL SPEED
SkyScrollX = 10
SkyScrollZ = 10

Last I new the sun strength did now work for me. This is what you will be looking for. Try .025 and see if it works. Says 100 is the default strength.

The sun image comes from Game Guru\Files\effectbank\reloaded\media folder and is called sun.dds

was thinking how cool it be if we had a sun position slider

agreed t bone, sun direction, intensity and colour would be great.

@Pirate Myke Thank you for that info.

@Teabone. awesome videos. thanks for sharing.

reliquia: PBR fit your cartoon media really nice , great shots

Yes i made some parameters you can adjust to get the PBR look you want.

#define RealisticVsCool (0.60)
And:
#define AmountExtractLight (0.50)

Ups forgot to move those to settings.fx , so currently there are inside "apbr_core.fx".

Anyway , i tested many different engines to see how they present PBR and they are very different , so i made the above 2 settings.

RealisticVsCool: allow you to control some of the PBR light and light extractions from the environment , if you want it to look more like UE try to set it around 0.90 , if you want a Unity PBR look try to set it around 0.40. I made it like this , as i expect people will have different expectations for PBR.

AmountExtractLight:
This allow you to control the extraction of light , this is actually the sun from your skybox that you see on your car , so what you see is light extraction. to lower the intensity of the sun you can just lower this value.

And sure you can also control PBR using the gloss/metalness textures , the roughness of the material ( from the gloss texture ) defines how light is spread out on the object , so when you have a more rough material the light will be spread out more on the object and the intensity will also decrease.

But yes getting the skybox sun to fit the cook torrance specular is a problem in all engines, but like you did: We can rotate the skybox in GG so it fits

Preben, on a related topic. I've noticed that a lot of PBR (and maybe DNS) models that have large flat dark/rough surfaces are influenced really badly by the sun, the sides facing away from the sun aren't even lit in the slightest, and are almost so dark they're black, Even in a really dark room there's always enough ambient light for the eyes to adjust slightly too so, but GG doesn't seem to take that into account it just makes them black. Is there a way to reduce this effect?

@Preben - this is real cool stuff going on here - it is hard just keeping up with changes, let alone remembering them all - lol.

I like the idea of settings we can tweak for the PBR look we want, I know GG is meant to be easy to use out of the box, but any serious dev wants as much control as possible. So great stuff for adding features like that, will be having a play with that for sure.

By the way, on a side note the skyboxes\fog work really great now - great work.

@Belidos - yes agreed, I noticed that in the out side world two while working on the car model, but not sure if it is just my lack of experience at doing PBR from scratch....

Reliquia....

Unreal Engine add more light to the "dark side" thas one of the many differences from other engines , so it is also part of the RealisticVsCool setting try to move it more close to UE perhaps 0.9

But generally the PBR ambi dont match the terrain (everything should match) , so thats one of the MANY lines on my todo list, so PBR entities will get a ambi second look soon, and i agree it do need a little more on the dark side.

@Preben - lol use the force preben!

I played with those settings in the apbr_core, using my car model with textures done in Substance and it seams to work pretty OK, but as you say there is more work to be done on the dark side

But the work done thus far is amazing.....

By the way the terrain seams to be broken atm - like the variation texture does nothing - off topic I know but just noticed it while messing with the level I be using to texture the car....

Reliquia....

Works perfectly here , see screenshot , how does it looks when you do it ?

@Preben, doesn't even get placed in the slot no matter how many times I select it. Will give it another go tomorrow....

Reliquia....

I posted on GitHub this morning I am having same issue changing the textures