Age Lighting a conversation

If you feel like you're up to the challenge of building your own Ages in Blender or 3ds Max, this is the place for you!

Re: Age Lighting a conversation

Postby Sirius » Tue Apr 09, 2019 1:31 pm

From what I can tell, there are various screen space effects like SSIL that are essentially ambient occlusion but with GI. Those are extremely low range, but are pretty good at what they do.
Then there are also things like SEGI which essentially voxelize the space around the camera and does raytracing on this small voxel volume. It's pretty impressive and has a longer range but is also quite power hungry.

Then there is true raytracing on nVidia's cards... But to be perfectly honest, from what I read/saw it's really shitty on performance (especially at higher resolutions) for nearly no quality increase over traditional lightmapping + post processing, and that's going to remain the case for the next couple of years. I guess nVidia is just trying to shove a useless product down consumers' throats to make some easy money, like it did with PhysX, GSync and 3DVision (although those are all pretty good techs but all abandoned by nvidia). Let's just hope this is not again one of their cash grabs and it actually lives longer than 2-3 years, because from what I can tell, THIS would be extremely useful to improve lightmapping tools, and on the very long term might actually become useful in video games. However movie and game companies are so used to lightmapping taking hours that no one else feels the need to finance such an expensive tech - hence making gamers pay for it instead.

(Well, at least that's what I'm guessing from various articles on the net, but then I'm no expert in those things either :geek: )
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Re: Age Lighting a conversation

Postby J'Kla » Wed May 01, 2019 1:18 am

OK This one is doing my head in.

I am in the process of building a simple age and documenting the process as I go.

I have a plane which has a basic texture I have a simple lamp of type spot projection onto the surface.

When I export the spot light did not show on the surface.

But I know that this worked in another age so I appended the plane surface from that other age into my experimental age and placed it under the spot lamp and it showed.

So we know the lamp is correct

So I changed my Material on the plane that was not showing to the Material from the Appended plane

Then I switched off the appended one as a plasma object and exported and tested again. :?

No spot light image?

We know the Spotlight works we know the Material works I have tried lots a number of variations of unwrapping I have compared the planes I am still experimenting.

Please does anyone have any ideas

[edit]
Now this is weird I subdivided the plane and the spotlight shows nothing else now I am really confused.
[/edit]
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Re: Age Lighting a conversation

Postby Chacal » Wed May 01, 2019 7:30 am

What surprises me is that it worked at all, because I thought lighting only works on avatars in Plasma, which is why you have to bake your lights or use vertex painting.
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Re: Age Lighting a conversation

Postby Emor D'ni Lap » Wed May 01, 2019 11:41 am

J'Kla, I'm not sure if some research I did many years ago pertains to your question...or not!

However, I was stumped on why a projection spot I'd created (yes, in Blender) wasn't showing up in-game. My first post in these forums was on this subject (and got exactly zero response, despite my sample file having been downloaded many dozens of times).

D'Lanor sent me the PyPRP code covering lighting matters, and I located what I thought was an unnecessary multiplication-by-pi in the code, and then with a bunch of empirical testing verified that dividing the spot cone's angle by pi gave me exactly the results I was looking for. D'Lanor later reported this finding, but I have no idea whether the code was subsequently altered to correct this.

TL;DR: It's possible you may not be seeing your spot because the beam is spread out to over three times the angle you've input to Blender, making it so weak as to be invisible. Try dividing that angle by 3.1415.... and see if it makes a difference.
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Re: Age Lighting a conversation

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Wed May 01, 2019 12:50 pm

J'Kla wrote:OK This one is doing my head in.

I am in the process of building a simple age and documenting the process as I go.

I have a plane which has a basic texture I have a simple lamp of type spot projection onto the surface.

When I export the spot light did not show on the surface.

But I know that this worked in another age so I appended the plane surface from that other age into my experimental age and placed it under the spot lamp and it showed.

So we know the lamp is correct

So I changed my Material on the plane that was not showing to the Material from the Appended plane

Then I switched off the appended one as a plasma object and exported and tested again. :?

No spot light image?

We know the Spotlight works we know the Material works I have tried lots a number of variations of unwrapping I have compared the planes I am still experimenting.

Please does anyone have any ideas

[edit]
Now this is weird I subdivided the plane and the spotlight shows nothing else now I am really confused.
[/edit]


It sounds like you are using runtime lighting on static meshes... don't do that. Plasma Runtime lights are cast to vertices, so expect to see changes in the lighting as you increase the number of vertices in the mesh. You should instead use the lightmap modifier and non runtime lights to light your object for the best results.

Emor D'ni Lap wrote:J'Kla, I'm not sure if some research I did many years ago pertains to your question...or not!

However, I was stumped on why a projection spot I'd created (yes, in Blender) wasn't showing up in-game. My first post in these forums was on this subject (and got exactly zero response, despite my sample file having been downloaded many dozens of times).

D'Lanor sent me the PyPRP code covering lighting matters, and I located what I thought was an unnecessary multiplication-by-pi in the code, and then with a bunch of empirical testing verified that dividing the spot cone's angle by pi gave me exactly the results I was looking for. D'Lanor later reported this finding, but I have no idea whether the code was subsequently altered to correct this.

TL;DR: It's possible you may not be seeing your spot because the beam is spread out to over three times the angle you've input to Blender, making it so weak as to be invisible. Try dividing that angle by 3.1415.... and see if it makes a difference.


Korman's lighting code does not inherit this issue, AFAIK.
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Re: Age Lighting a conversation

Postby J'Kla » Wed May 01, 2019 1:42 pm

At least I now know why the lighting worked on one surface but not the other.

I am going to spend a couple of days getting my head around how to do this group light mapping and baking thing.

Strangely the first place I used it wrongly it looks fantastic. and lights my avatar beautifully ;)

This also adds something to warn the Noob's about in my training documentation.
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