What's in Stingray 1.7.1177 to illuminate movable objects?

[Anonymous]

There is a "Light Probes" solution in Unity. There is a "Lightmass" Light Samples solution in Unreal Engine (UE3 and UE4). There is a "Total Illumination" (SVOGI) solution in CryEngine and Lumberyard. What's in Stingray to illuminate objects like characters or vehicles etc. ???

I saw that the character was not affected by the surroundings. I thought Reflection Probes affected Skeletal Mesh, but it did not. BUG?

[Shanii2]

well careful manipulation of reflection probes really lits your scene up, it takes a little practice for light rendering like just any other software you would. Watch this tutorial and see if this helps. Not only reflections but any light that bounces of can illuminate the surrounding , if its not backed then you can use it for dynamic lights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjpCXYUpnEc

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your comment. I waited a while for other comments to arrive. So I did not want this topic to turn into chat. I watched the video you mentioned.

What I'm talking about is more like this.

Https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/ENU/123112/files/...

Especially this video. Http://download.autodesk.com/us/support/files/turtle_-_pointclouds.m4v

[paul.kind]

Hrm, I am not sure it is possible in stingray to do that kind of thing.  Let me ask someone more knowledgeable in this area to check this forum topic.  

[paul.kind]

Yea, as i had expected, Stingray does not have a solution for this yet.  =(

I will update you if this changes.

Paul

[_robbs_]

Reflection probes will help, and may give you enough of the effect you want.

Your dynamic object is lit by a combination of multiple light contributions:

- a base diffuse contribution, which comes by default from the Global Diffuse Map you set in the shading environment, but may be overridden by baked light.

- a specular contribution, which comes from the Global Specular Map in the shading environment, but may be overridden by local reflection probes and by screen-space reflections.

- dynamic contributions from direct lights.

So say you want the color of the surrounding room to bleed onto the character when your character walks from a yellow room into a red room. If you place reflection probes in those rooms and bake those results, then they will feed into the specular contribution for your character. This will produce the color bleeding effect in proportion to how much specular contribution gets blended into your character's materials. So you'll see more of the color bleeding at sharper angles and on materials with lower roughness.

But the diffuse lighting on the character will not be affected. So if you look straight on at a surface, or if your surface is super metallic, you won't see any color bleed at all.

You can also of course add in some low-brightness omni or spot lights into the scene to fake the effect, but obviously that's not the ideal way to go.

[Anonymous]

It will be useful to make a step-by-step video that takes care of this issue. Although the information you provide is valuable, it is not an acceptable solution. Thank you.

[paul.kind]

The specific functionality you are requesting simply is not supported at this time.  I wish there was a better answer, but there is not one.  Your only choice is to use dynamic lights if you want illumination to be dynamic.  We are aware this is a problem and it is something we have our eyes on but at the moment we do not have a solution like what you are asking for.  I spoke with one of our lead rendering devs on this topic and it simply is not supported yet.  I wish I could tell you otherwise, but having you waste time trying to figure out a workaround solution would simply waste your time.  

Your choices currently are Baked Lighting, Dynamic Lighting, or Emmisive channel lighting (if baked).  You can use reflection probes to pick up local colors but they will not add "light" to the scene.

Wish I had better news, but the truth is always best.

If you can tell my what you are trying to achieve maybe I can help you figure out an acceptable solution with the tools we have, but, point cloud "irradiance" based lighting just does not exist in the engine currently.

Paul

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to see the beautiful side of Stingray. If you go over this problem, I think it would be better. Because, when you're preparing content for the game, you do it for the game engine you're using. The CryEngine does not use the 2nd UV channel because it is dynamic. The second UV channel came to Lumberyard 1.8. Unity is using the 2nd and 3rd UV channels for Enlighten. UE4 is using the 2nd UV channel for Lightmaps. No need for a second channel to use VXGI in UE4. I need an extra channel(other than 1st). Because I must use a mask to add detail to the materials.

I prepared a few pictures to make the problem clearer.

[Anonymous]

more pictures...

[Anonymous]

and more...

[paul.kind]

Ok, so you are illustrating a few issues here.  I will go ahead and answer them all in seperate posts.  Accept the ones that you think solve the issues they try to solve.

Lets start with bounced light color as this is what you were referring to in the above thread.  I believe how I would handle that is with a secondary light.  You can exchange my vlaues around and you can swap light types, but below i show your example where you are point a spot at the wall and want light bounced off.  Below is the most "efficient" way to handle it (without baked lights).  You can also bake the primary light if you choose since it wont see anything causing moving shadows, the bounced light would have shadows on and has to be dynamic though.    This is a very old school way of handling it, but it works well enough....

[paul.kind]

For your next question (if I understand it correctly) you are wondering about UV's and how to use them,

Stingray is extremely flexible in this regard.  Yes, the 2nd UV Channel (Cood1) is used for lightmapping when baking light, however you can still use it outside the baking.  You can also use a total of 5 uv channels.  Below i have created a very hypothetical UV setup.  I doubt the results would be good but it illustrates how you can use the varying channels to produce a material.  I have used as many as 5 coordinates before, but it is rare, generally i use the 1st and 2nd channels when i am making repeating textures.  1 for my repeat, 2 for my unique (lower rsolution) dirt maps and smudges and stuff like that.  THis allows me to make non repeating elements overlaying the repeating texture to reduce the look of repeating.

[paul.kind]

Controlling the Exposure

Im not sure this directly answers a question above, but may help you resolve some of the issues you are finding.

You can use Dynamic Exposure to help in overly dark and overly bright areas.  It basically dynamically controls the exposure by measuring the overall brightness of an area and normalizing based on that information.

To add it in simply go to your shading environment and add  the component "Auto Exposure".   (+ sign next to Shading Environment) 

[paul.kind · Accepted solution]

So a lot of your examples are using a very old piece of content and honestly its not the best to illustrate some of the lighting issues you are seeing.  For one, the materials are not using proper PBR practices, the scene was virtually all light baked, and i cant comment on whether the problems are due to the content.  Like the self shadowing should definately work.  I will need to look into the scene a bit, i built is before stingray was even in beta so I need to look over how things are handled again to refresh myself.  It is possible we are not using a lot of the new features either.  Give a little time to review the content and see what you are finding in it.  May just be some older settings dont make sense anymore or there is a better way to resolve it.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your interest. I wanted to ask if there was a solution that escaped. I hope it will develop in future versions.