Planned Features/Progress Report
Weapon Shader (WIP to establish all essential features before branching off to other shaders)
Character Shader
Static Shader
Entity Shader
Terrain Shader
Bug fixes
Expanded Dynamic Lighting (fix dynamic lighting problems, allowing up to 3 dynamic lights + muzzleflash)
Specular + Reflection
GGX Specular response (use physically based specular response for static and dynamic lights)
Approximated GGX Cubemap response (Use mip mapping and filtering to emulate the GGX response)
Diffuse
Lambert Diffuse (Use basic normalized dot(N,L) for low settings)
Oren-Nayar Diffuse (Use a microfacet based diffuse response, useful for rough hardsurface (Rock/Plastic)
Disney-Burley Diffuse (Use a subsurface based diffuse response, useful for rough softsurface (Cloth/Fabric)
Ambient
Emulated Ambient Bounce and Skylighting (Use SurfColor, AmbiColor, SkyColor and FloorColor to emulate bounce lighting)
Cubemapped Ambient Lighting (Use the cubemap for ambient lighting)
Matching BRDFs for lit and ambient lighting (Make lighting and materials consistent when lit and in shadow)
Extras
Sub Surface Scattering Effects (Use modified lambert shading and mipmapped normals to emulate light scattering)
Controls and Defines for enabling and disabling settings and features (use #define to control features for compatibility and performance)
Physically consistent settings and effects (Reduce the need for artist controlled lighting response)


Hi there,

Some of you might remember me from the FPSC forums a few years back. I've returned there a year ago and developed some PBR based shaders for the (now free) software, with extra features supported by the Black Ice Mod. I'm nearing my completion of them and thinking about bringing them over to Game Guru to help introduce modern graphics techniques to the engine and help teach it's users current gen practices for content creation, such as understanding reflections as a scale of roughness-smoothness.


My goal is to produce a series of shaders consistent with one another that follow basic Physically Based Rendering principles while fixing general problems with the default shaders.
These principles include Energy Conservation (As specular reflection increases, diffuse reflection decreases), Fresnel (Everything becomes 100% reflective at glancing angles), and Microsurface (a reflection's blurriness is defined by how rough or smooth the surface is)
Recommended Reading:
https://www.marmoset.co/posts/physically-based-rendering-and-you-can-too/
https://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/
http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-course/
http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2014-shading-course/
http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/
http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2012-shading-course/



These shaders however may give you 'less control' over the lighting response using the graphics sliders and settings. However this is because such control is not physically accurate. Settings such as 'Global Specular' will become completely redundant. Control of lighting is dependant entirely on the textures and the lighting that they receive, the shaders should always react the same.

However one advantage of Game Guru's shaders I noticed was the use of '#define' to change settings in shaders to reduce the amount of shaders necessary.
I will uses this system to allow for a wide range of settings to support a range of assets, from stock assets without PBR textures to custom assets with PBR specific textures.
I will also use this system to support a range of texture authoring methods and workflows, such as supporting both f0 specularity and metalness workflows. For further detail read here
It will also allow you to optimise your assets better as you enable or disable specular, normal mapping or cube mapping individually.



Currently I am experimenting with introducing the techniques into the stock "weapon_bone.fx" shader to understand how GG interacts with its shaders and have no real presentable progress so far, however the state of the FPSC shaders can be followed and seen at:
https://forum.thegamecreators.com/thread/219208
https://forum.thegamecreators.com/thread/217263

That's realy interesting ,and very cool to look at.we are getting spoiled here at gg at the moment,will defenatly be keeping a eye on this.thank you for working on this.

Dave

Nice! I'm very interested in anything that helps standardize GG's asset input with other engines. It might help incentivise artists who do stuff for Unreal, etc. to port to GG while helping GG artists prepare for expanding their own reach. Personally speaking, I use p3d.in (poor man's marmoset) to previs models and textures and it can be frustrating when remixing maps for GG and watching material fidelity go down the drain as a result. So, I'm really excited to see what you can bring to us.



This feature has always confused me a bit. I always felt like I had to max it out to get of full range of spec out of most entities but doing so also would blow out spec effect on terrain and grass which (surprise, surprise) didn't support discrete spec maps and instead used some sort of arbitrary internal spec generation. I'm not entirely sure what the slider is meant to accomplish other than making some things look wet.

The fpsc work looks brilliant ....
Cant wait to see what you come up with in GG

Will be a great asset for Game Guru. Cant wait to test them out when they are complete.

Progress
Weapon shader seems to be taking shape, but it looks very strange to me. The specular looks a bit flat to me.
Ambient lighting also goes to black when too bright for some reason. I am having trouble getting the Burley BRDF to work with ambient so maybe that's the issue. (as I was uploading the video I found out it is.)

The default lighting sliders are a bit iffy. Here's what I generally have been running...
https://puu.sh/v8H5C/ee748527e6.jpg
I've found these to show show weapon shader pretty well. Others will have setting they prefer.

Sent you a PM... may or may not be helpful.

Errant AI had been very generous to lend me his M92fs model to test out the shaders. Very cool so far!

Cool Can you explain to me which channels do what and how I need to go about AO (I had been baking it in)?

The S texture is used for a lot of things so the channels each serve a purpose if their feature is enabled. Ideal I want people to imagine it as an all round "surface" texture rather than a "specular" texture to detach it from last-gen terminologies and so that people understand it's purpose.
My idea was to have each channel define a property of the surface's materials.
Red channel is smoothness/gloss. However I will allow a setting that switches it to work with roughness instead, more like Unreal Engine 4.
Green channel is Ambient Occlusion. While GG supports AO anyway I kept this from my FPSC version.
Blue channel is Sub Surface Scattering. This is to control the strength of the SSS effect that can help make skin look more smooth.
Alpha channel is Metalness. I normally have this inverted so that textures are easier to view, but that's optional. I also plan on having it be the direct specular texture for the specular workflow option.

Here's a thumbnail showing how the M9's S texture's channels look.

Top is red. Middle is green. Bottom is blue.


The N texture is the normal map as always but I use the alpha for illumination.
However, like metalness I usually have this inverted so viewing the texture is easier.
I would have had the blue channel be ambient occlusion to make it a general lighting texture had I not already put it in the S texture.

Very cool. Cant to wait to try them out.

Progress!

I fixed some of the artifacting after finding the line in DICE's papers on their PBR techniques for Frostbite. http://www.frostbite.com/2014/11/moving-frostbite-to-pbr/
I have no idea how it works, but it does. DICE, how do they do it?

I'm also adding their method for Reflection Occlusion using AO.

okay. How do I get my dirty paws on early experimental stuff? Where do I sign up?

Was that the artifact causing the painted look?

Seems to be coming along nicely. I'm going to have to mess with trying to get some textures more deliberately targeted for this.

Eventually going to have to bite the bullet for a PS upgrade and Quixel, etc. when I get serious about targeting PBR :S

Do you think you'll be able to get effects like self-shadowing with this shader?

@Wolf
I'm hoping to soon start releasing the shaders in a kind of 'open beta' to encourage people to make content with them and unstanding how they work.
I'm just working on getting bugs sorted out and adding settings for people to mess around with.

@Errant
The artifacting was causing the white pixels on the fingers, but I don't understand why.
I really have no idea how to do shadowing or anything. I'd wait until the stock shaders get a feature like that before trying to add it.

This is something I have been waiting for, you can do a lot with _S, _N, _D and _I but if we had decent PBR in GG then we can make everything look so good. I know it is going to take a while to get everything done but it will be worth waiting for. Thanks for all the hard work.

Progress!

Dynamic lighting is now fully supported.
However GG seems to lack muzzle flash lighting for some reason.



I think all I really need to do is fix up some of the ambient lighting errors and then start open beta.

I like it. Great start.

"uzi idiot": This is some pretty interesting stuff , not sure why i did not see this thread before now


This is done to make sure the value is never zero , you must do something later that depends on non zero values ? funny how you can spot a coder, Lee would ALWAYS use a max() instead of this , and i would always use a clamp

Errant AI: self-shadowing is not currently possible , mainly because if we place the gun in the depth buffer it would cast a "funny" shadow on terrain/objects. a floating gun and hands , would look scary , i added a fast dither 5 shadow for the gun in this shader , this could be improved pretty simple as it currently use cascade 1 , "uzi idiot" try to change to cascade 0 and see if Lee is setting this in this shader , if so it will give a mush better shadow on the gun and without a fps drop, gun is always very close so perhaps cascade 1 is not really needed ? never tested this.

If we should have self-shadowing the gun and hands should be added to a "fake" player object , so the hole object "the player" dropped shadows, or a special depth buffer should be added only for the gun object.

Looking forward to check out the shaders

PBR Public Beta 0.1


http://www.mediafire.com/file/59ta737z935octm/Public_Beta_0.1.zip


This is a little testing package for everyone to try out. I think it works fine but I'd love to hear feedback.

It features a retextured stock Uzi along with the weapon shader that it uses (and a few others that I haven't touched yet)
I've also included a PSD file so you can see how I did the retexturing, reducing lighting in the albedo and making the roughness and SSS texture

Hopefully it works fine for everyone

Will download when I get home,many thanks
For your work on this so far.looks great .

Dave

Thanks. Will check it out.

very cool - but the cubemap can't be opened in gimp, it keeps saying "header error"

Yeah GIMP probably can't handle 32 dds files.

My new install of photoshop can't either for some reason. It used to work fine.

Yup, i'm getting the same.

It should be viewable in the DirectX Texture Tool from Nvidia

Has anyone made some cool stuff with the shader yet? I want to see how people are using it so far.

Thought this was just the weapon shader. I could probably make something quick up to test them out.

It is just the weapon shader. The rest are just the original shaders.

@Uzi Idiot

I have a new weapon that I want to try with this over the weekend. Any chance you can send me the maps you used on the 92FS? I have the maps from the early test but not the later version.

PBR in GG would be AMAZING.

Mike

I'm actually wondering if a specular workflow would really be worth adding.
It would mean that the S texture would have to work by different rule (rgb being specular colour and alpha being roughness) which I think makes learning how to use the shaders a little inconvenient.
Also I wanted the shaders to be based on UE4 so that assets could be passed back and forth.

Hey Uzi!

Just throwing this out there:

I understand that these PBR shaders are rather finicky to get working and probably take a lot of time but I'd like you to consider releasing an effect shader pack. Back in FPSC I misused a lot of shader effects for energy/water and light effects. Sadly all of these turn out black in GG. Just a pack of ray, fur and glowy shaders if you know what I mean. We could do a lot with these level design wise.
I'd understand if this would be too tacky for ya though.



-Wolf

How do I get in contact with the guys at TGC these days?

I really have no idea how the shadows in GG work and I need help.

Just send Lee an email at lee@thegamecreators.com he should be able to help you out.

Hi uzi , i worked with Lee on the shadows in the current release , mainly i made the shaders and Lee all the rest , so if its about the shaders just give me a PM and i will try to help you.

EDIT: forgot , i made a //#define DEBUGSHADOW ( in settings.fx ), you can enable this to see the different cascade shadow levels