3889 replies to this topic

[ICPjuggla]

 

1st screen shot is in VP9: spheremap texture took me 2 seconds to accomplish and looks fantastic in the table with little effort..

 

2nd screen shot is in VPX: using the material manager, took about an hour 1/2 and the texture still isn't even close to looking nice and not the same across all the wire's.. Some wires look different from each other meaning all wires don't blend the same... In my opinion it doesn't look good and far from real..

 

How did you setup the material? I would recommend either:

a) choose metal, and set the base color to white or something grayish. with shininess you can steer the look of the metal then (chrome being more or less 1).

b) choose metal, and set the base color to dark gray, and the clearcoat to white or bright gray.

and choose NO image for the object itself! its not necessary.

 

Also in the second post of this thread i posted some material test tables, where you can see how the parameters of the material interact with each other and what effect each parameter has on the overall look.

 

EDIT: i can also tweak the parameters for your test table if you like, just post it here, and i'll setup the material and lighting.

 

 

toxie, your post helped a lot and your material tables helped big time as well... 

 

It's starting to sink in now...   

 

 MaterialWireTest.png   1.74MB   21 downloads

[Shockman]

 

The wall has metal top, metal8 sides. The primitive is metal2. I would show a mess of pictures but they would all look identical. Changing the metal materials around, applying clones that had each value set opposite of where it was. I can not alter this image using metal materials or by using altered metal material. It's grey, but that's about it. the side of the primitive shows some texture but nothing that would suggest to me metal, but only lighting, and stripes that are something reflecting on something grey. I can have a convincing metal on the wall, using images of metal, as long as I don't use a metal texture (just washes it out with grey), but plastic, or plastic with an image. No option with primitives though.

 

The picture is metal materials in their default state.

 

I have to assume it's just me. Is my system just not capable of displaying these?

Edited by Shockman, 19 March 2015 - 12:38 AM.

[Shockman]

 

 

1st screen shot is in VP9: spheremap texture took me 2 seconds to accomplish and looks fantastic in the table with little effort..

 

2nd screen shot is in VPX: using the material manager, took about an hour 1/2 and the texture still isn't even close to looking nice and not the same across all the wire's.. Some wires look different from each other meaning all wires don't blend the same... In my opinion it doesn't look good and far from real..

 

How did you setup the material? I would recommend either:

a) choose metal, and set the base color to white or something grayish. with shininess you can steer the look of the metal then (chrome being more or less 1).

b) choose metal, and set the base color to dark gray, and the clearcoat to white or bright gray.

and choose NO image for the object itself! its not necessary.

 

Also in the second post of this thread i posted some material test tables, where you can see how the parameters of the material interact with each other and what effect each parameter has on the overall look.

 

EDIT: i can also tweak the parameters for your test table if you like, just post it here, and i'll setup the material and lighting.

 

 

toxie, your post helped a lot and your material tables helped big time as well... 

 

It's starting to sink in now...   

 

MaterialWireTest.png

 

Those look nice, except for the effect that reminds me of chroma-crawl on an old crt TV. None look bare metal though. Powder coated, or anodized at best. I would use the top upper one though.

Edited by Shockman, 19 March 2015 - 01:04 AM.

[toxie]

but thats not due to the material (i'd guess), but due to the lighting settings..

 

as said: post your test tables here, and i'll make them look right, then you can pick off from that..

[mpad]

In the test I like the most left one the best.

[Nidwin]

but thats not due to the material (i'd guess), but due to the lighting settings..

 

Toxie is right. It's mainly due to lack of lightning and shading effects that makes your material look grey and not metalic.

I had the same issues with my screws, still not properly fixed but that's not my priority at the moment.

 

What I also found out is that I made those materials way to "light" and by darkening the grey color I had much better results.

Edited by Nidwin, 19 March 2015 - 09:00 AM.

[Talantyyr]

Thanks for the material help toxie, i'll try that too! 

Btw, i just wanted to create a collection of all the ramp parts to make it easier to assign a material to them, but my table is full of "Ramp0XX". 

Could you make the collection manager dialog non-modal so i could pull it on my second monitor and click through all my objects and see the names and add it to the collection? (or is there a shortcut or something i'm missing?) But currently i find the collection manager quite hard to use, as i would have to write down the name of each object, or rename every object... (which probably isn't such a bad idea.... )

[fuzzel]

The collection manager isn't ment to be used as a search/select dialog. For this purpose there is the other search/select dialog (hot key Shift+Ctrl+E) where you can sort all elements and select them as you like.

Edited by fuzzel, 19 March 2015 - 10:04 AM.

[Talantyyr]

Thx, i didn't know this dialog  

Btw, i've just noticed there's a rightclick -> To Collection option 

Sry, I'm still quite a noob and i'm having a hard time working on that table ^^

[toxie]

As for the material & lighting once again:

I know that its a steep learning curve coming from VP9 (which basically did only have -broken-, and also only barely noticeable lighting scheme, on top of a very oldskool material model (like 20-30 years oldskool)), but what is in VP10 now is what literally -everybody- is using nowadays (its based on a layered material model incl. remapping of parameters developed for Disney artists, nowadays also used in UE4 and lots of other games and projects, which i again simplified a bit more for you guys).

 

Going forward, this is one of the few ways to have a "sane", but also reasonably simple material model right now, that will still allow to extend on top of that later-on, including more advanced lighting and so on, so that we don't have to break compatibility yet again in 2-3 years.

[fuzzel]

rev1855 is up. Only some minor changes :

 

- search/select dialog converted to non-modal dialog

- further shader cleanups
- only set transparency for lights that actually feature 'real' transparency
- update to latest freeimage (3.17)
 

[Shockman]

What might be better than sending test tables in for editing, would be to have a wire ramp on the default table. Saying they should have no image applied added confusion for me. The most realistic looking ones I have ever made in X is with a wrapped metal image.

 

Everything on the default table that is metal, and has an entry box for an image, has one of the two metal images in the image manager applied to it. The metal side walls, the return lane covers, even the primitive screws. The side rails, which are two identical strips of metal uses different metal images for each one, I suppose to have them shaded differently. With that in mind, and the fact that metal images is used on everything possible, It appears images, not materials, are dominate in the display, not only for texture, but lighting, and if a stainless steel wire ramp was on the default table it would be using one of the images all the other metal parts are or have a metal image even better suited.

 

It also appears to me from experiment that using a metal image with non metal material even will give more convincing metal than any use of the metal materials,edited or not, without an image,  The default table not only aggrees, but confirms. And metal images with metal materials are closest.

 

I think my biggest problem with these materials, is that their imagination comes alive. They seem to reflect light where no light is. The shading seems to be based on position, orientation, and shape, more than the placement of lights. This might be the environmental light being picked up, but the shading seems too spotty. As far away as that light source is, it should we well dispersed, 

 

 Wire ramps... At times there are parts of curves that look absolutely brilliant though.

Edited by Shockman, 19 March 2015 - 02:22 PM.

[dark]

From a 3D software point of view, materials (.mat) should control things like, how shiny (specular) an object is, how glossy an object is (whether light spots/blings are small and focused or spread out and diffused) etc etc......it shouldn't really effect the image (texture map) itself.  I think the issue people are having with the new material set up is they are having a difficult time 'controlling' the result where as previously we faked all aspects of realism in VP which in turn resulted in more artistic interpretation when it came to lighting.  The new lighting and material system in VP10 is the first big step towards real lighting and it will take time for people to get used to it and 'material libraries' to be accumulated so that there are more 'cookie-cutter' materials available for easy application. 

 

I haven't had time to play with VP10 as much as I would like but I don't think you can do too much to change the lighting besides moving the day/night slider (am I wrong?).  The more lights in a scene the more processing it will take, especially if those lights cast shadows, and usually even more so if lights actually move in real time.  It would be nice if the lighting could be adjusted the same way you would set up lights in a 3D software, set up a few target lights with various parameters....probably would have to limit the number of lights.  A 3D scene (such as a 3D pinball table environment) can have dramatically different looks just by changing the lighting around.  When I texture bake a 3D object for VP, I often end up with 10 or more texture maps to test out how it will look with various lighting positions and settings,  this trial and error process is just something you can expect when trying to tweak the look of something in a 3D environment.

 

I think sphere map is an option that perhaps maybe shouldn't of been removed since it was often a quick and easy way to apply a texture to an object (which often works great as a base image), particularly metal wires, however sphere map should still be able to have a material applied on top of it.  I don't understand why sphere map was removed exactly since it's the image and the .mat should just control it's specular/glossy.....I know the idea is to move towards more realistic lighting but I'm not sure why sphere map was detrimental to this.

[toxie]

The lighting still misses the option to exchange the environment map completely (and especially the HDR part is missing, but HDR maps are not yet implemented and wired in VPs texture manager).

That could already make a huge difference, and i hope i can implement that soon (currently VP-time is a bit limited for me).

[dark]

Oh nice, yes HDRI can add a lot of realism especially with metal+lighting reflections.  That should make things much easier to provide a realistic look for metal ramps that looks uniform on the table.  I made my avatar image using HDRI.

[Nidwin]

Dark

 

You have the day/night slider and also a light above the table that you can tweak.

[Shockman]

So .mat files are a math file created with a 3D program, and only when you are good enough with it to basically set it up for fine rendering. No wonder that question was never answered. Another unanswered question, I have to answer myself. No we can't have a material with rgb sliders.

 

 It seems we are going to need a slew of materials, one for each color. Not only that but one for a medium dark yellow shiny, and another for a medium dark yellow dull, to give one example out of thousands at least. Is that correct?

 

I can understand .mat files to give a material, but not to give a color. Why would .mat files not work if we were still able to give an object a color?  The more I learn about the new lighting and image mapping, the more it scares me. Will we be able to use a material that allows the color we need and another to give it the material it is? I can without fail look at a picture of a pinball machine part and tell what it is made of, so I STILL don't understand why a material should be anything other than 'don't rape the image' one that i'm yet to find.

[dark]

Can you actually move that light and adjust the direction it points?  There's also "Far Attenuation", emit light shape, light distribution type, filter color etc.....lot's of options in most 3D software to adjust lighting effects that could be considered for VP.  I would think that a typical scenario for a pinball table would be 1 or 2 'room lights (dark/light) for global lighting, but as we've seen with many 'night mods' or pins being played in a dark room, the room lights or environment lights are almost completely absent and it's the table lights driving the over all look of the table.  You can see in the demo videos of unity3d that when flashers go off on the table the light will fill large sections of the table hitting every object along the way in a 3D manner, the same is true for lighting reflections off of objects.  I hope that in time we will see similar effects in VP as well, but I have no qualms with seeing small calculated steps towards that goal since performance should always be a priority.

[Shockman]

OK, there was a lot of frustration in my last post. I do have confidence in you guys. Maybe this is a very early point in a very long beta cycle. Much more so than the impression I was getting. I'm all for that.

[Shockman]

Can you actually move that light and adjust the direction it points?  There's also "Far Attenuation", emit light shape, light distribution type, filter color etc.....lot's of options in most 3D software to adjust lighting effects that could be considered for VP.  I would think that a typical scenario for a pinball table would be 1 or 2 'room lights (dark/light) for global lighting, but as we've seen with many 'night mods' or pins being played in a dark room, the room lights or environment lights are almost completely absent and it's the table lights driving the over all look of the table.  You can see in the demo videos of unity3d that when flashers go off on the table the light will fill large sections of the table hitting every object along the way in a 3D manner, the same is true for lighting reflections off of objects.  I hope that in time we will see similar effects in VP as well, but I have no qualms with seeing small calculated steps towards that goal since performance should always be a priority.

The ambient lighting source has settings for height, but not position or direction, but that seems to change depending on the material used. Playfield as a material casts light (looks like a glowing fog to me though) at the upper right. Plastic, which I use (in an effort to clear fog) for the playfield, much lower and a bit right.