Understanding diffuse lighting in The Division

cubrman

Newcomer
Here is a screenshot of the main character walking under a bright lamp:
3.jpg

His hat, that was originaly dark grey, turns completely white. My question is how can such lightsource do this without making everything around it superbright? Cuz that's what my humble attempts resulted in.
4.jpg

I can only think of two options:
- they either use a standard diffuse formula (it has got to be diffuse light as it does not react to camera movement) and have a lightsource that fades extremely quickly (fastar than the standard quadratic attenuation model.
- or they use some clever shaders for clothes to make them "catch light" so fast.

Maybe it's much more simple?

Here are two more shots, the floor is not nearly as bright as the character that goes under the lamp:

1.jpg
2.jpg
 
It seems like the standard kind of stuff that happens when PBL with deep HDR buffers and more sophisticated lighting models than vanilla Blinn-Phong are incorporated into the rendering engine and asset production. Exemples like yours can be seen in many other modern games, I guess.
 
Im a real noob on this, but is not just a question of the angle calculation + diffuse reflectance of the material ? Different for the moving objects ( the characters ), and other static objects ?
 
Last edited:
You're also ignoring the possibility of specular contribution, which is surprisingly important even for materials we'd not consider to be shiny. Cloth in particular is pretty interesting because it's composed of tiny fibers so the highlights/reflections can be pretty strange. Try to search for cross polarized photographs, where the specular component is filtered out from the image, they're very very cool and show you how diffuse is only half the story.
 
60297670_ddc80086f1.jpg
 
Yeah that's what we call "peach fuzz" and it's really important because humans have such a soft layer of fur all over their bodies, even on faces and even on women. Particularly important with rim lights (when the light source is to the side or even to the back of the character) because it creates a subtle "glow" around the silhouette edges.

I'm still wondering how games are going to pull this off - fur rendering in offline for this isn't particularly expensive, compared to proper SSS shading; but realtime renderers have no good way of dealing with fur at all. Most of what I've seen so far is a simple cheat...
 
TressFX for skin rendering?

Mandatory laser hair removal for everyone to improve the realism of real time rendering from the other end?
 
TressFX for skin rendering?

Mandatory laser hair removal for everyone to improve the realism of real time rendering from the other end?

The latter (obviously) - we cannot allow graphics to look unreal.

Now for the answers:
It seems like the standard kind of stuff that happens when PBL with deep HDR buffers and more sophisticated lighting models than vanilla Blinn-Phong are incorporated into the rendering engine and asset production. Exemples like yours can be seen in many other modern games, I guess.
Darn, if thatt truly is the case I am very sad cuz I would love to have such effect in our engine.

You're also ignoring the possibility of specular contribution, which is surprisingly important even for materials we'd not consider to be shiny. Cloth in particular is pretty interesting because it's composed of tiny fibers so the highlights/reflections can be pretty strange. Try to search for cross polarized photographs, where the specular component is filtered out from the image, they're very very cool and show you how diffuse is only half the story.

Well I also think that they are using some sort of extra texture for this stuff, that is the hat and the jacket definitely have some parameter raised up to make them catch light faster.
 
I'm still wondering how games are going to pull this off - fur rendering in offline for this isn't particularly expensive, compared to proper SSS shading; but realtime renderers have no good way of dealing with fur at all. Most of what I've seen so far is a simple cheat...

Even in nature a similar effect exists without actual hair:
weintrauben-rot,property=bild,bereich=bio,sprache=de.jpg

No need for hair-simulation, one develops an approximating function if needed in a shader.
 
That's not the same effect at all. Peach fuzz can pick up light coming from behind the object and light up because it's highly translucent; this also means that it extends beyond the silhouette of the object (even if only just a little).
This is quite a bit exaggerated but maybe helps to show what I mean ;)
270907182_ef25ba42de.jpg


What those grapes have instead is a very blurry reflection that intensifies based on camera incidence angle. Also very interesting, but much easier to recreate.
 
They are using some kind of blown out specular highlight. It certainly isn't energy-conserving. It also seems to apply to all the materials on his clothes even though his clothes have different materials. His jacket isn't the same material as his hat or his hood. The roughness of the specular seems to be pretty large too covering a huge area. Simply put, it doesn't look physically correct at all.

Also, on the cloth material -- we use a velvet shader. Basically a Blinn model that also takes into account the facing ratio (normal dot view). It gives pretty good results without having to render individual fibers.
 
Back
Top