Very impressed so far, keep it up team

Dave

This is looking great, once the terrain system is in, can't wait to get back into some creation. hope the grass and zones are next, then the flashlight, but seeing what wickeds lighting is fantastic I think everything is coming along great. Roll on September

I am really impressed at how fast GGMAX has started to evolve now with the Wicked Engine now in the editor. I can not wait now until the next ALPHA release!

Excellent work !

I hope they add fully lighting in the next alpha, currently the models in max looks worse than in classic

No,no they don't, believe me even without lighting they look better than in classic. heck, even without any textures they look better than in classic :p

Anything I have managed to import looks 100 times better in GG max without a doubt. The Wicked Engines light system seems "light years" ahead of classic, no pun intended.

Should have gone to Specsavers
J/K

i am just reffering the chair models belidos made

@osiem80



This is not a Max/Wicked Engine issue. This is NOT because Max displays worse than Classic. This simply a case of having proper PBR materials. Once the settings are corrected for that chair, it will look correct.

This is a corner piece i was playing with All details are just normals , i could never get that in Classic


Dave

The materials are fine, it's simply because there is no proper lighting in the max alpha and a bad angle, and tbh osiem needs his eyes testing because even without the lighting in place it looks better than classic., Even in that picture.

all i mean is this grey areas on the chair

The grey areas are reflection because the light is too close and bright and the wrong colour , it's just bad camera positioning, there's two or three light sources in the editor that are in awkward positions, it's hard to find the sweet spot, will be better when kee sorts lighting out properly.

They look too shiny for the type of material of the chair, regardless of the bad lighting Max is currently using. Especially when compared to the Classic render. Looks like a roughness setting that needs to be adjusted. That's something that would need to be adjusted for Max when compared to Classic.



Completely agree.

Yeah that's max lighting, in any other renderer game or modelling engine they're perfect.

I have found something odd though with max, i'm not sure what's happening, but it doesn't seem to be actually registering the _gl;oss texture at all, if i put a black in or a white one they both look exactly the same in the engine, i don't think it's actually applying roughness at all and taking the "shine" from the normals, and that's why it's coming out so bright and white.

In my opinion MAX is shaping up quite nicely.

I think they set the lighting for the cellar to give it a good effect.
I mean those models used look excellent .

It is very odd since it looks like GGMax taking roughness into account:



apbr_core.fx file.

I guess PBR textures in GGMax is not defined yet, actually in the cellar demo, they treat textures differently, I even think they already use the surface texture.
I also think there is a function that imitates the pbr effect in materials, although these are not pbr, maybe this has something to do with it; What I do know is that now almost everything new is experimental, and the old is just GameGuru.

This came out as it looked in Quixel

apart from not being able to play with the lights

Dave

I think i've worked out my issue, most engines for the roughness and metallic only need those textures to have a grey channel to work, but GG for some reason likes to have RGB channels for greyscale information, i re-exported my gloss and metalness using greyscale images on RGB textures instead of a single grey channel, and it now shows up much better, go figure.

Yep. Different engines can have different ways of approaching PBR materials. There are a few "flavors" out there.

Wicked engine will take a little adjusting I think, but the Max demo is not a good indicator. It has 2 lights inplace that you cannot adjust; you can't move them and as far as I can tell there is NO ambient at all, or it's real low in the Max demo.

Were still in alpha, nothing shown to date is a clear indication of what it will be like when everything is in place. We will see a lot better results when lighting is "properly implemented", rather than a couple of lights set in stone From my tests using the cellar demo, where the lights are set well for the scene, any object I have added looks great.

The water I added looks great and the Hulk, looks a little dark maybe, but can't alter any settings in the demo, or indeed the angle to view him from, unless I move him of course And that's with my very limited texturing skills A good artist will make the wicked engine sing
That water though, it is so much better than GG's. People will probably let go a little pee pee when they get to use it (if Max's water is the same, which I am quiite sure it will be).
I apologise if TGC are going to release a water demo but really it moves so nicely you may get too excited I can safely say it's the best animated water I have seen in an engine I can play with I liked Sources water effects a lot, but even that lacks the waves this beast has built in! Those waves you see all move super slick and smooth

There's definitely something funny going on with the _gloss in Max, I don't think it's actually working as its own texture at all, at least it doesn't look that way to me ...

This will show you what i mean, from left to right they are the same model, with the same textures, with minor differences;

LEFT: greyscale _gloss on an the grey channel in an RGB texture,
RIGHT: greyscale _gloss on a texture with only a grey channel,
MIDDLE: AO, Metallic, and Roughness packed into the RGB channels of a _SURFACE texture

all textures are from the same source images and simply packed into their respective sets.



Note how the two _gloss models aren't reflective at all, but the _surface one looks awesome. I have a feeling that the individual _gloss texture isn't hooked up yet.

I think so, as I pointed above.

and here's my chesterfield in Max, left one is the old PBR workflow, right one is using a _surface texture...



I don't think the classic PBR method has been implemented fully yet, hope that's sorted before release, otherwise it's going to be a lot of work converting old models.

It's not MAX, but I've been playing around in Wicked Engine editor and learning all about _surface textures. It's definitely worth investing the time to learn to make them properly. Still a bit confused by the need for a reflectance map in the alpha channel - I get what it must do but I can't find any examples online of an example of a reflectance map. I don't get why it's needed when you've got metalness and gloss to play off against each other. Either way, there's something quite satisfying about seeing my old PBR assets that looked so 'meh' in Game Guru come to life in Wicked (and hopefully soon MAX).

Game Guru Classic:


Wicked Editor 0.42.2:


Game Guru Classic::


Wicked Editor 0.42.2:


I have to say though, despite the obvious graphical, terrain, and interface improvements, I am slightly concerned we're only a few weeks from launch and we've still yet to see a first person camera holding a gun and moving around a level.

AE

@ Belidos, presumably if you rename the GLOSS textures as ROUGH in wicked/max it will work OK. Highly likely as you say the gloss suffix isn't being picked up as a roughness texture in the alphas yet. There's no reason why they shouldn't be used interchangeably as long as everyone realises that a GG classic gloss texture is actually a roughness texture. Would make much more sense to me for Max to stick with the wicked idea of naming a roughness texture as 'rough' and also assuming anything suffixed 'gloss' as also a roughness texture for backwards compatibility with classic(ly) named asset import.

Would imagine the combined SURFACE texture would be the best way forward for new assets into Max, whether the engine will create those on the fly if needed (from artists supplied individual PBR textures) or they always have to be artist created I'm not sure but guess will become clear in September.

@AE - some great looking scenes there. I too am confused about how useful 'reflectance' is and in what cases they shine


Cheers.

Just tried that, and nope, didn't work.

Still experimenting



Dave

Max is likely to ship on time.

Lee only needs to complete the integration work now. All the hard work is done adding a new graphics engine.

He has an artist working on the hands and gun animations so those can just be plugged in once they done.

"we've still yet to see a first person camera holding a gun and moving around a level. "
LOL. Sure, yeah. But it's coming-- FPSCreators will supply!
Who's to say we don't want a stock UFO Starship flying around, shining down
spotlights or picking up creatures?

Wow, MAX does a huge improvement as shown in those scenes @ Avenging Eagle.