ByteMixer wrote: ↑Mon Jan 07, 2019 1:34 am
Looking nice! The newest screenshots remind me a lot of some of the Legend of Grimrock (and Grimrock 2) dungeon walls.
It almost looks like the newer green blocks dungeon wall texture has a little bit of specular map to it, which would be good for the damp stone wall look that Oblivion kind of overdid in caves. Little details like that, I think less is more. Too much, and you end up with stuff looking like plastic or clay rather than stone or limestone.
Physically-Based Rendering (or rather, the lack of it) is responsible for the "plastic look".
So basically, there's two ways to do diffuse and specular lighting. One way is fast (but was "good enough" for some years), and the other is correct but slow. A Google search for "physically based rendering" got me this picture. As you can probably see, the left rifle looks plastic, while the right rifle looks plastic, metal, and glass, as appropriate, although I think their metallic/roughness textures could use a little work:
http://www.meta3dstudios.com/wp-content ... 098549.png
The fast but "good enough" way is to calculate diffuse lighting (using a diffuse texture), calculate specular lighting (using a specular texture) and adding them together. The end result is that light out <=> light in. The lack of reflections on the left scope actually has nothing to do with PBR.
The correct but slow method is almost exactly the same, except you use a metallic/roughness texture instead of a specular texture; you reduce the diffuse lighting by the luminescence (think I got the right word) of the specular lighting, you generally do some other math involving words like "fresnel" and the end result is that light out <= light in.
This isn't an either-or switch; it's more a matter of "We've switched enough of our algorithms to be based on physical lighting formulas, rather than abstractions of physical lighting formulas".
Other upsides of PBR include:
* It looks better no matter the lighting. Previous lighting models often had to be tuned for that specific situation, room, textures... As you saw, Oblivion's dungeons had too much specular highlighting. While PBR wouldn't completely change it, it would look "less wrong". Shiny rocks, rather than shiny plastic.
* It's easier for artists to work with (or so I understand)? since values like reflectivity and roughness are predfined? Also, you can just take pictures of real-world things and make a texture out of that?
* Everything no longer looks like plastic. Really, that's the most important part.