Quote from: Oshyan on July 02, 2011, 04:25:01 AM
Excellent. The vegetation really blends in much better now. Some very bright rocks, even in bright light I would be surprised to see them get that white, but they do look less shiny. Is this now with all specular removed?
The rock shapes and texturing are overall quite good. I especially like the buildup of smaller rocks on the canyon floor.
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan.
I'm not very happy with the vegetation yet. I think it looks dropped in, rather than part of the scene. Already made some improvements on that.
I found out what caused the bright rocks. It wasn't specularity as that was removed entirely.
I think it's a "bug" in the fake stone shader. Some stones weren't "formed" and remained as flat patches on the surfaces. The ones which are formed incorporate the displacements and shading as they are supposed to do via the shader input port.
Those flat patches will have the same colour defined in your fake stone shader itself, despite you have exchanged it for displacement/texturing via the shader port.
Within those patches fake stones were created from other fake stones shaders and they in turn incorporated the white flat patch created by the other fake stone shader.
The merge shader which blends the fake stone layers together needs to work in "highest" mode to avoid stones on stones, but since the patches are flat it can't discern between this anymore.
I "fixed" this by choosing a fake stone colour as close as possible to the main canyon surface.
I'm not sure to call it a bug, because the consequences are logical, but I'm not sure why the flat patches will get the colour from the fake stone shader itself instead of the shader input. Also, on what conditions decides TG2 to really create/form a stone and when not to?
Difficult stuff, anyway, I've kind of fixed it.
Quote from: Kadri on July 02, 2011, 08:20:37 AM
Nice image , Martin!
The lighting looks a little too harsh too me. I like the cracks
Thanks Kadri. The harsh lighting is improved. It's actually a bit of a consequence of the cracks which I reduced over distance and also made slightly less strong.
Generally I've noticed that the more cracks and other fancy stuff you do in TG2 the harder it is for the renderer to create balanced lighting. It seems.
For instance, the unnatural fast dropoff of shadow lightness and surface brightness is the first thing one notices.