35 réponses à ce sujet

[TimelordDC]

Bioware used an industrial renderer. The lighting solution provided to the public will never give an output that is similar to the Bioware levels using the same light settings (there are many threads in this forum that discuss lighting and you can find this in any one of those). You have to experiment and find what works best for you.



About character lights, every Bioware level has them...usually placed outside the level and covering a large area.

[-Semper-]

i've done more then one post to this situation... do you read the forum?^^

look here or here.

the second one is outdated. oh, and bioware uses char lights. sometimes they're within a separated room or just outside the level geometry. the 3 lights only affecting characters with huge radius.

better don't care too much for lighting else you are doomed

Modifié par -Semper-, 14 mai 2010 - 01:03 .

[-Semper-]

try to place bright static lights in front of the pillars similar to the lighting amotsphere of your level. (e.g.: blue atmosphere - white static, orange/red atmosphere - yellowish static and so on). you won't get the same outcome as bioware but it will do the trick in some way.

i guess that's why first bio won't let us create our own levels because they can't deliver a lighting renderer. later some developers grabbed yafray and modified it to work with the toolset. if you are able to bring back this guy to rework the script then perhaps you will get your shiny effect

Modifié par -Semper-, 14 mai 2010 - 01:07 .

[Kilrogg_]

You should try literally opening up a .lvl from the main game and just rendering the lightmaps, that's the only valid comparison imo. If you copied the light settings from another level you may have missed something.

[Kilrogg_]

Nevermind I see that is what Semper did in that old thread

[-Semper-]

look at my post the second link. i rendered the beginning of the dwarfen origin without editing anything. as you can see there're big differences

long time ago bioware confirmed that they can't publish their tool because of third party code and license agreements.

edit: yup^^

Modifié par -Semper-, 14 mai 2010 - 01:16 .

[Kilrogg_]

Out of curiosity did you also copy the atmosphere settings from the original level? More specifically, do you have bloom enabled?

If not thats probably why the lighting is not popping as well as in the original area.

Also if you want to get better lighting on the character, place a large radius static light that doesn't affect the level but affects characters. That should help get it closer to the original lighting as well.

Modifié par Kilrogg_, 14 mai 2010 - 03:55 .

[-Semper-]

well, you can use many static lights before your framerate will drop BUT they should not affect characters. to light your character you have to place light probes in the rooms which share lights, one ambient light per level and 3 light sources outside of your level geometry. the 3 lights can lit your whole level, groups of rooms or just one room. that's controlled by room properties and the atmosphere you want to create.

as kilrogg said you can also use the bloom effect to bring in a bit of shinyness. there should be a similar setting to control the blooming effect. dunno the exact name right now. with hsvmatrix you could increase the saturation - but you figured this out already^^

it's a lot of experimentation and the outcome still looks washed out but we have to live with that. the fact that the alpha maps are calculated wrong and that the script got problems with uv seams and tesselation borders and other quality dropping issues is more troublesome.

the good thing is: rpg players are used to "bad" looking graphics :innocent:

who knows, perhaps the lightmapper and the toolset will be updated. perhaps dragon age 2 ships with a better solution (if it's editable) or someone with python and yafray knowledge could rework the script.

with rpg's sdks there are always problems...

Modifié par -Semper-, 14 mai 2010 - 09:03 .

[Sunjammer]

It seems to me there are three parts to our "lighting" equation:

• the basic light mapping solution (and all its issues)
• the atmosphere settings and frame buffer effects
• areadata.xls which includes HSV and colour curve settings

It is worth noting that atmopshere and framebuffer effects can be maninputlated by scripting as well as being set in the level editor so even if you faithfully copy the level setting you may still get different results.

Similarly if you don't set the AREA_ID variable to right entry in areadata.xls you'll get a different colour curve and HSV setting.  I don't think anyone has really looked at how areadata.xls affects an area's look and lighting but to give you a quick example of its potential impact:

AREA_ID = 0 (default):
http://www.sunjammer...ata_demo_01.jpg

AREA_ID = 42
http://www.sunjammer...ata_demo_02.jpg

AREA_ID = 60
http://www.sunjammer...ata_demo_03.jpg

Incidentally the colour curves, for anyone interested, can be found in [install]\\packages\\core\\data\\textures.erf.

Modifié par Sunjammer, 14 mai 2010 - 10:04 .

[-Semper-]

i would not set my own areas to the same id bioware used for their areas. within the areadata.xls it's also controlled how many xp you get for entering and in which span the enemy should autoadjust their level. you still need an entry to use hsvmatrix. within the editor it's just a quick preview with no impact ingame. just give your area a unique id and create your custom m2da.

[-Semper-]

when you open your level with the toolset within the area properties you can enter 3 buffer effects. da_bloom, hsv_matrix and da_fade. bloom and fade will work if you set the values with the toolset and export your level. hsv_matrix will only be previewed within the leveleditor. to enable it you have to set a unique area_id and create a custom areadata.gda. there you can enable post buffer effects and directly impact the graphical outcome.





the second screen is the same level with exact same settings. only hsv_matrix is enabled with slightly increased contrast and decreased saturation and the color curve cc_urn210.

Modifié par -Semper-, 15 mai 2010 - 11:17 .

[TimelordDC]

What do the Color Curves in the areadata 2da refer to? And what exactly do they do?

[-Semper-]

they are no secret^^ i used for hsv:



brightness = 1

contras = 1.02

hue = 4

saturation = 0.9



yes. the current lightmapper can't handle alpha maps. they always drop shadows but they should not do so. another bug is the blue shade the pole is covered with. ingame it's better visible. i can post a screen with black dots - that's another bug i sadly can't get rid off.



i've not played with colour curves but after looking at the textures they are just a filter so you could create effects like sepia.

[Sunjammer]

That's probably because it's actually called da_hsvmatrix.

[mikemike37]

this is the first time ive even heard of these curves/hsv etc! is this mentioned anywhere on the builder wiki? will certainly be looking into this!

Modifié par mikemike37, 15 mai 2010 - 12:25 .

[Proleric]

As a quick kludge, you can set the area variable AREA_ID to 1. That picks up some default area settings from areadata.xls (including HSV settings, if you specify the filter da_hsvmatrix on your level).

It also does other good things, such as enabling creature scaling for combat.

Of course, you can add a custom row to areadata.xls for every area and fine-tune it, when you have time.

[Kilrogg_]

I ended up not using CC curves in my areadata because it changed the lighting too much. You can blank out the value with ****