192 replies to this topic

[TNT2]

Wow. Awesome!

[oddzilla]

Wow, some of the renders are mindbogglingly good. The write ups of all the different steps are informative and the translation from Blender over to VPX is fascinating.

Jumping in more to the VPX world now that my pincab is in working order and it's really interesting to see how the sausage is made.

[naeromagus]

Incredible, I swear that each time you release a new table it looks Closer and closer to the real deal.   

[dinodino]

Amazing.  Thanks for the update and everything you are doing for the community!

[brad1x]

Oh man this looks amazing, I am speechless!

[R_L]

Amazing stuff 

[sifusun]

looks FANTASTIC flupper1   THX THX THX

[Nemo]

I think i just might have wet myself.....

 

Insane, just marvelous dedication to the pinball dream right here.

[bietekwiet]

The realism is out of this world (how contradictory that can sound)!

And on top of the realism, the lighting and mood in those table screenshots just make it look awesome.

I am very excited for this table.

[Mr H]

Chapter 3: inserts
 
For Whirlwind I wanted to do clear inserts instead of the usual more clouded inserts on older pins. It took way more time then I expected, but this is the result (please zoom in on the images, this a 4k screenshot):

 

 
I used a new way of doing inserts as well. This is how it works:
 
1. First step is creating the inserts in 3D in blender:

The 3d modelling of an insert like this does not take me long, about an hour max. The real challenge lies in getting the materials right, so that after transferring to VPX it looks nice.
 
2. I render the inserts for two states: light off and light on. For the "light off" state I only use Blender Cycles rendering. But I could not get the "light on" texture to look right in Blender. So I tried something new: another render engine (https://luxcorerender.org/). LuxCoreRender can do something Cycles cannot: bidirectional pathtracing. Cycles does raytracing by starting a ray from the camera and then bounces across all objects & lights it meets in its path. This works fine for reflections, environment lights, etc but its drawback is complicated lighting situations (like a lot of internal reflections in a pinball insert). LuxCoreRender also starts rays from the lights. This gives much better results for the "light on" texture for the inserts. And LuxCoreRender is opensource as well and fully integrated with Blender. So in the interface of Blender I can just switch from Cycles to LuxCoreRender and render away. Examples of the rendered & composited textures for the inserts:

 

BTW: these are at rendered resolution (1024x1024), for use in VPX I scale them down to 256x256 (or smaller for smaller inserts)
 
3. One of the issues I faced with the prerendered Totan textures, was getting the inserts having the right perspective. In order to do that better in Whirlwind I made the inserts in 3D for VPX. The full insert 3d model has way too many triangles for that, so I made a very simplified version of an insert: sort of like a tray which displays the texture more or less in 3d space. In a picture:

 

On the left you see the simple 3d tray, on the right you can see how the UV of the tray overlaps the rendered textures. 
Each insert needs two of these trays: one for the "light off" texture and one for the "light on" texture. 
 
4. In VPX I display the textures like this: the two primitives (one for on and one for off) are at the exact same position. The "light on" primitive is slightly larger so sits underneath/outside the "lights off" primitive. In order to display the insert, the playfield texture is transparent at the spot where the insert is supposed to go (no hole in the playfield, just transparency). The "lights off" primitive has "disable lighting from below" set at 1, the "lights on" primitive has that set at zero. This enables that a VPX light underneath both primitives can light up the "lights on" primitive with the transmit property in the bulb section, without affecting the "lights off" primitive. The "lights off" primitive has a material with an opacity amount of 0,99, so that a sufficiently bright VPX light transmitting its light through the "lights on" primitive lights up the whole insert. I made a picture which might explain this more graphical:

In order to show the insert decal, there is a VPX flasher object slightly above the playfield, which only contains the decal texts (see the picture).
 
This all might seem complicated but hey, it works! And: it fully uses the normal VPX lights, so everything fades properly, bloom works, etc. All of the inserts in the 4k playfield screenshot each only use 1 VPX light. To change the color of the insert for the lights off situation, only a VPX material change is necessary. Doing inserts this way has added about 8k triangles to the VPX table and about 3Mb of textures, so I expect that this method should have no impact on performance. The only drawback I can see is that only on a 4K screen you can properly see the inserts...
 
Next chapter: https://www.vpforums...e=2#entry443863
 

 

Hey Flupper, I'm putting together a table and want to go through this method. Did I see the 3d model of inserts that you have done uploaded somewhere?

[mrjcrane]

Very nice work man !!!

[flupper1]

@MrH:
No I did not make a demo table of this yet. Reasons being:
... I did not get around that yet, been helping other people and working on Whirlwind (and some non pinball related time spent on things like redoing my home UTP network, with 60+ meters of flexible full Cu SFTP cat 6A networks cables for four rooms and a mesh wifi setup...)
... there is one catch when using these: they use the the transmission aspect of vpx lights for the effect, this can cause issues when you have other objects near the inserts; I still have to find a workaround for that
... I only made the inserts for Whirlwind (and that took me weeks), so there still are a lot of insert types missing
... I am still hoping that the issues in the VPX VR executable are fixed; they do not work in VR at all unfortunately

[tgx]

This might be the table that prompts me to build a new rig.

[Mr H]

Thanks @flupper1. I must have been imagining something then, thought I saw inserts somewhere to use. Thanks for getting back to me.

 

Sounds like you've got a lot going on in your world. Stay safe!

[bord]

Mr H, I think you're referencing Schreibi34's inserts. They're excellent:

https://vpinball.com...-insert-images/

[Schlabber34]

I plan on uploading all the insert meshes i have. But it's a big mess right now, especially the scale. I only used them to create insert images.

 

Second thing is, alot of them are high poly meshes because of round bevel egges.

[Mr H]

@Bord @Schreibi34 bingo - thanks guys that's going to be a massive help.

[wrd1972]

@MrH:
No I did not make a demo table of this yet. Reasons being:
... I did not get around that yet, been helping other people and working on Whirlwind 

 

And I want to send a big shout-out to flupper for helping me with the new F14 ramps while he is still working on WW. He is an invaluable asset to the community and especially to the table authors like me. Nearly all of my tables (and many others) are better due to his contributions. 

Also very much looking forward to the public collections of insert meshes and images.

[STAT]

Pure Magic here with this Works ...

[naeromagus]

I am so grateful to be a part of this community. I think back to when I first played visual pinball. Amazing how far this has come thanks to all of you great people.