So this is a bit late, but as promised - here's the fourth and possibly final installment of my lighting tutorial series.

It delves into creating amazing-looking scenes with finishing touches that will blow away your audience(s) with seriously advanced lighting (relatively speaking!).

http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com/2016/10/technique-trainingevaluation-seriously.html

I really hope you all enjoy it and as always please let me know what you think!

Sorry to dig here but I'm curious - I've gotten a significant amount of views on this post but no comments. Was it not as useful? Did I miss anything?
Thanks

I've read your post but haven't had a chance to check out the tutorial! I'm sure it's great as usual!


EDIT: I read it finally! Great information in there as always. I had forgotten about reshade. I've since replaced drives on both machines that I use regularly and I also put a GTX 1080 in the desktop. I will have to fire that up again. The hit on performance hopefully won't be as dramatic as it was before. Thanks!

Great stuff, Lots of useful info. Thanks for posting.

This tid-bit right here makes the article worth reading.

Thanks Sepp - yeah, that little bit took a lot of monkeying and questioning (I think wolf put me on the right track when he told me not to ever use pure white for a light as it won't work in static mode) to figure out.
Between that and the bloom thing, it makes a big difference on end results (IMO). Couple that with the capabilities of reshade and you can get something that looks reasonably good.

Thanks... I have this free pdf kicking around on lighting and colour if anybody wants a look.

Free PDF on light & colour

Nice document. You have an interesting writing style.

I especially like the last bit about creating lighting with a spotlight, sprites, and omni light.

In the case of game guru you'd have to use a static light, a dynamic light, and two sprites. I'll have to test this out to see if I can achieve the desired result or not.

Thanks for the information! Interesting

Hi Bolt Action Gaming, I have to say this is an old pdf from a few years ago but not produced by myself. I just thought it may be of interest and was a free download. If your one for reading there are some links at the bottom of the pdf that lead to some good articles. Some are great and some out of date.

Anyway, the link is here Game Studies Archive just skip to the heading "Alphabetical list of authors and their articles". I have found them interesting but have not had the chance to read through them all...

I would like to see some screenshots comparisons of lighting technics from the veterans here between FPS Creator Classic and Game Guru. How much has it changed?

Also keep the articles coming... Maybe Wolf can make a you tube video or blog on how he made one of his map scene too. I how love to see how he tackled the lighting.

How about it Wolf?

Hello!

I'm a bit late to the party because I took a vacation from the interwebz.
I've been reading through B.A.G's tutorial just now and let me say thanks to take my game as an example for your lesson. I really appreciate it when my efforts on here are inspiring others. (Did you notice that the sreenshot you shared in your tut had some props not reacting to lighting as they where linked to the wrong shader or is that well concealed?)



If she has 5 minutes, can you show her my w.i.p of acythian and point out everything that makes it seem dated or otherwise unappealing and then share it with me? I always appreciate that kind of input.

Now, there are some things that are odd to me and others I don't necessarily agree with.
I'm not too fond of reshade or any tacked on postprocessing. I never use it and I believe it only adds features that Game Guru should have natively.



Indeed!! However, proper design, texture work and of course lighting is most of the process. Just pointing out that postprocessing can enhance but never fix.
I think most players have to actively look for the difference in the example screenshots yet they'll likely spot that bright blue barrel being stuck in the metal floor right away. I know its just a demo scene...but I had to..say something.
Also note: Bright lights for light sources, dark lights for additional ambience. (this can backfire quite horribly so I can only recommend it to users who somewhat understand the baking process)

Now on to what rubs me against the wolfish fur: Lee is wrong.



It isnt. I've been using mid level bloom settings around 50 in most of my scenes. I've only started to go higher because I was going for a washed out, hazy retro'ish look with recent efforts.
Seeing this I loaded up a large, completely lit map of mine and started to play with the bloom slider. I got the results I have expected. Bloom is just that. Bloom. While it adds a lot haze and shininess directly to light sources and bright surfaces it does not affect the lightmaps themselves. Observe attached screenshots:



Mid level bloom settings around 50 or lower.


Zero bloom


very high bloom setting

You see, what controls your brightness is the surface level slider. Its the most important part of baking. In this screenshot its switched off yet bloom is still active:




Just an additional example with high surface value and very low ambience settings.

Why these desks are suddenly glowing red is a recent bug I have yet to get to the bottom off... let me just say that its wildly annoying.

Its possible that I misunderstood Lee here, he'll likely know way more about 3d programming then I do. this is just my experience and what I could replicate.

Back to Bolt Action Gaming: I appreciate your efforts to be a beacon of education about game guru and how to use it because we dearly need it, if what they put on Steam Greenlight is any indication. Your tutorials are always to the point and well written without ever getting convoluted. Everything is immediately recreatable for the reader. I hope we'll get an improved lightmapping system...and I hope you'll be writing about it!

@gd:

I do some things differently but game guru and fpscreator use roughly the same system. Aside from having sliders and generally more control, there is barely any difference when you get right down to it. this is why my old lightmapping tutorials are still somewhat useable. I really appreciate your interest...but I also feel like opening a thread where I start comparing my old work to newer work would be too much like tooting my own horn.



All there is to lighting technically is placing the sources, turning down ambience, ramping up surface level and hitting F3. But as Bolt Action has described it in his tutorial, the devil is in the detail and the aesthetic choices matter here. His tutorials are quite valuable in this regard.

I have, however written a tutorial on how I approach making an entire map. It includes placing the lights. The differences in GG are rather insignificant and I think that it translates one to one. Just note that I wrote this in 2011 so my english is less refined and I was a lot younger. (english is my 4th language by the way.)
Note that this map is in the style of a series of games that I have finished and released. There'll be an archive with download links available soon.





-Wolf

Sorry for the oversimplification in saying bloom was tied to light brightness. It's a sort of half truth watered down for the masses, in this case.

Lee's exact response was:
"Essentially the light only contributes part of the lighting equation with the other color coming from the texture itself. To make something brighter than the texture you are lighting you need to overexpose which means using the bloom slider. Also, clever use of low ambience and high surface level settings can also make something brighter, but it would not normally be lighter than the texture without a dynamic light to 'add' light to the equation. Maybe there is a case for adding a new field to the light markers to 'overexpose' the colour for the light mapper, so you can 'wash out' the natural texture colour with the colour of the light. Maybe something to discuss with the community to see if it's something they also want?"

So I go by a simple 'effective' value. Does bloom impact how bright the lights APPEAR? And my testing came out to be yes, they did, significantly; though it was important to have high ambient/surface values to properly provide "REAL" brightness.

This is of course, if you follow my previous guides in that you're using a combination of static AND dynamic lighting to provide maximum light value. It's difficult though to get that extra edge and at least with bloom turned up, it did make a big difference (overexposure is a real issue though, so it's a knife-edge balance to proper values).

I've got the demo pics in my post of course, so you can see the results I already obtained. YMMV.

As to reshade, I'm genuinely satisfied with the results but I do use non-stock settings. The default values left a lot to be desired and the smoothing alone is completely worth it. I should show you a side by side of EAI's snack machine with the split screen - in GG default it's pretty good but jaggy. In reshade it's beautiful and smooth.

From my experience (and it is really annoying me at the moment) static lights aren't effected by bloom (at least not the amount of light backed), they're effected by surface level. The thing that annoys me is surface level when turned up causes weird patterns on textures (especially solid colour areas) when turned up, but it needs to be turned up to get a decent level of light from static lights, which are needed in big scenes because only the three closest dynamic lights will illuminate. This is something that really needs looking into.

Sorry if I was unclear - surface light value IS the primary driver for static light potency (as mentioned I think in my lighting guide, section 3) ... but bloom *DOES* have an impact on how bright those values appear. It's obvious the way I worded that in my 4th guide is a bit in error and will need a fix to clarify.

But basically I get what Lee was saying. Because of the additive effect bloom has on light values as rendered, it has an EFFECTIVE (as in not direct, but end result is similar) value of increasing the light's brightness.

Even wolf's example shows this very clearly:


Pay specific attention to the wall underneath the foremost blue column in the middle of the room. It very clearly is getting brighter.

Sorry, just read what i wrote, and realized the "and it's really annoying me at the moment" part could be ready as your article is annoying me, it's not meant that way, i mean the way gameguru handles lights is annoying me, hope i didn't upset you.

Yup, tat's what i was getting at too, the bloom effects the brightness of the glow of the light, the surface levels effect the size of the baked light and how much area it lights.

Nah it's ok, I just realize I worded it poorly in my blog so I sort of started this entire chain but it's a really good discussion honestly and I love wolf's screenshots. Acythian is .. massively impressive But it's gotta be hell on optimization with all those objects.

NOTE: I POSTED AN ADDENDUM TO THIS TO BE READ AFTER THIS DOCUMENT AS OF 10/31: http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com/2016/10/lighting-guide-part-4.html

this is great but can't make a complete game without dynamic characters reacting to the static lights. it's good for screen shots but without the characters having any effect from the static lights and only run off the surface light there is no real gameplay here just eye candy. this needs to be fix and not over look anymore or with some type of work around. the static lights should just work with the dynamic models with out the fuss.

Hey there!!

@Bolt Action Gaming:
I see!! We where lost in translation there. Lee's fully worded response and your addendum are entirely correct now. Sorry for being a pain



Heh! I may be a purist about those things but good smoothing can sway me as well. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that proper filtering is necessary, I just ...want....it to be a native feature



Thanks a lot! And ha! You bet it is! Allow me to elaborate:

Despite having many enemies and effects in Acythian I can still play it on lower mid level systems by using specific ways of optimisation:
1.) While levels are way larger than in previous FPSCreator titles I still plan out how large they are.
2.) I try to give my levels a semblance of being cluttered, lived in and "breathing" however: the amount of different models and textures they use are limited. (I have collected models for almost a decade and could decorate an office desk (for example) with all the papers, cigarette buds, pens and knick-knacks you could imagine if I had a way to complete unload rooms from memory once the player leaves them...but I don't so there are only few and repeating detail objects.)
3.) There are never more than 5 enemies active at a time, but level design, plot and sound create an illusion of storming into strong enemy resistance (at least I hope this works)
4.) Scripts deactivate terrain and water whenever these are not seen which boosts frame significantly. (I hope this will work in the built game)
5.) Camera distance is always only as high as it needs to be.
6.) Detail props tend to source from the same texture pool.
7.) Interior levels can have long hallways so GG does not have to calculate too much geometry at once.
8.) Something I picked up when I was freelancing for the Unreal Engine: Whatever does not need polygonal collision uses boxic collision.
9.) Also notice how the models used in acythian are, in part, over 10 years old. While there is a lot on screen, a large amount of it is simply cubic.

Maybe this is useful to someone. Advanced, Bugsy style optimisation is mostly inhibited by my excessive laziness.


@Belidos:


Indeed. Weird mesh smoothing is what I assume this to be but I could be wrong. I can see how this can drive someone nuts, especially if ya try to go for a clean modern look. Weird artifacts and a somewhat "dirty" visual have always been part of my aesthetic in games so its only mildly annoying me (especially since I currently work on a cyberpunk game) but this issue has to be addressed sometime.

@MXS

I understand that you are frustrated, MXS, but isn't this a little extreme? I mean, c'me on! Most FPSC shaders never worked entirely correctly either. I've had releases that had shaders work on some rigs, but ended up with glowing characters on others...that did not kill the games.
We had blob shadows until Bond1 delivered the fake projected shadows in FPSC's late phase!!
I may be a burned child having worked with FPSC for so long but I don't think that the characters stick out too much in my maps. However, my game is in no stage to have any finalized chars so I use stock dummies. I will however go for a similar look like the chars in F.E.A.R.2.
As its a cyberpunk game I can get away with useless illumination on enemies leading the players attention further away from any faulty shading.
I bet that there will be people not noticing one there is fighting going on and bullets are flying.
Am fully aware of how outdated and terrible this is...but I can live with it is all I'm saying.
Also notice that the guns don't react to the lights as well. Attached is a placeholder char from different angles. (I have taken shots from all angles and can upload if need be.)







Note that deactivating that distracting shadow can be done but I'm unsure what looks better.



-Wolf

Some examples of the texture quality going up and smoothing - left side is after reshade, right side is GG default.


Note the detail in the rusty section of piping.


Again, texture definition is way up. I use HDR16 vs stock reshade value of HDR8. Boxes, circular shapes, etc all have less jaggies.


Texture definition again. That weird blurring is a stock GG SAO setting which I need to tune on that map.


One of the more dramatic examples - note the decal and lighting, the slag pit's walls... everything just looks better. Smoother and cleaner. Colors are better too.

Now this one is a comparison series.
Pay close attention to the potato chips on in blue/white.

In Game Guru, it's jagged.

In reshade + GG it's quite smooth.


Make sure you open those last two and really give them an up close look. It pretty obvious once you do.

Also nice tips on the optimization thing. I should have you do a guest post on my blog

I can see why you like that ReShade! Those results kinda kill my arguments against it. How much does it impact framerate?



What topic did you have in mind?



-Wolf

@ wolf:
An article on optimizing your level, of course!

Impacts depend on your system but since Game Guru is very cpu dependant (DX9 as a core). I didn't notice much impact on mine.

I run a franken-rig. I have a core unlocked X3 (to X4) amd 3.2ghz cpu, 8 gb of gskill ram, and a GTX960. Runs just fine on mine, no impacts unless I turn on lots of extra settings. Default settings are only maybe 3-5% slower than GG defaults.


@MXS
Also with respect to MXS's issue of static light mapping not showing on characters - this is why you want to mix static AND dynamic lights. I use a single or double dynamic light setup on top of my static lights to provide proper lighting to dynamic entities. It's difficult to do in an open world context but fairly easy if you're doing a room by room setup.