Release: Advanced Renderer v. 1.1 beta 1

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Some surfaces are very bloomy (overbright) - how to mute them down? (Gamma won’t work)

SWAT_OP-R8R

Probably by creating fitting specular maps (MetalnessMaps)

Schmackbolzen

Yes, if a constant value is not enough, then you need to craft special roughness/metalness maps. Otherwise just create a new entry in materials.json or use an existing one which is working for that.

Since a lot people asked about that (especially custom planet textures) I added some text about it to my release post.

@NeoTendar: Thanks! Yeah you can leave them empty if you do not need any text.

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So only metal textures having overbloom effect?

Schmackbolzen

For PBR rendering this also depends on your light source. With old lighting, the light intensity was in range from 0-1. With PBR you can have 0-infinite (or rather max float, due to hardware limitations). This is why I added tonemapping. It makes it look more like film (yes, analog film) would behave. I will try to explain this later in more detail in my documentation.

In short if you don’t want to have it so bright:

Change roughness of material
Reduce light color intensity of light source or reduce its range

Note that the viewing angle also plays a role.

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I use vanilla FL - not modded. Yes. Old lightning works well.
Why not to release these short answers directly for vanilla?

Tried other settings: much better

Schmackbolzen

The default settings in materials.json are more a rough orientation. They are used in our mod, where I have proper roughness and normal maps.
Note that I released the beta also so that people can understand better how PBR works. You will have to adapt your mod if you want to use it.
Also what you disabled there is the tonemapping, which just caps the maximum light value to 1. It is not a fix.
There will be another factor you can change soon: It is the exposure value, which already is used and currently set to a fixed value. I did not add this on purpose yet, because I am afraid people will use it wrong.
The idea is that you can change it in the config, or that I allow a value to be set per system. I also will experiment with automatic exposure control later.

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Used recommendations!
All Materials.json settings just not more than 0.2

Materials.json
Config.json

As you can see - no more overexposure (over local contrast).
P.S. Btw i have used graphically patched freelancer.exe before - sooooorry

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About photography - there is fun feature at Reshade = LUT.
You may use LUTs from Photoshop, Lightroom, etc
Might do add something similar to tonemapping option?

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Final variant for Vanilla Freelancer:

"Roughness" : 0.6
"Metalness" : 0.2

config.cfg
materials.json

Now there is no local overexposure at all.

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Light sources and headlight are not working at my mod.
And i have only Directional lightsources.

With: https://i.imgur.com/JnVNG1J.png
Without: https://i.imgur.com/VX1MzAd.png

IrateRedKite

@HeIIoween Looks like point light sources aren’t actually in just yet! I suspect they’re on the to-do list, these are also something I am eagerly awaiting

Schmackbolzen

To make this more clear I added it to the known issues list.
I disabled the point lights because vanilla FL uses them in many systems for fake planet ambient light reflections, which look weird without shadows. Also if those lights have shadows enabled they are too close to objects and the shadows break.

I will add a developer menu soon where you will be able to enable them. But if you don’t change the system inis lighting will be weird then at those places.

I never tested spot lights, so I will have to enable them and see if it works. They will for now not have shadows, though. If they work I will enable them by default.

I will add some other useful stuff to this menu, like reloading all textures (only in FLARDATA\textures), reloading the materials.json, reloading shaders and I also think about adding adoxa’s hook for reloading the system in case it also reloads the models (not tested yet). This should really help for live testing stuff.

Also as I already wrote in discord chat to @HeIIoween, you should not reduce metalness too much if the material is metal. I just write it here again so that people do not get bad advice. You can see here, what happens if you do that (it behaves more like e.g. plastic or ceramic).

I also added some more PBR links to the documentation (more to come).

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@IrateRedKite @Schmackbolzen i have got at 1st 1st post about Directional light. Thanks about PBR and links

Problem, that i do not know what type of light gives this explosion - is it spot, point or directional or some sort of inference of light?

effect_explosions.ini

[Effect]
nickname = explosion_br_elite
effect_type = EFT_EXPLOSION_SHIP
vis_effect = gf_explosion_br_ship02
snd_effect = med_explosion1
lgt_effect = elite_flash_to_red ; <-- enables light source (type?)
lgt_range_scale = 30 ; scale of light
lgt_radius = 30 ; radius

lightanim.ini

[LightAnim]
name = elite_flash_to_red
frame = 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.1
frame = 0.3, 0, 0, 0, 0.1
frame = 0.5, 255, 225, 128, 0.7
frame = 0.8, 255, 200, 128, 0.9
frame = 2, 55, 0, 0, 0.1
;; note - even 2 frames are enough to enable light

Schmackbolzen

I had the explosion lights working before. The thing is FL likes to fake lighting stuff with vertex colors - so I do not want to answer that right now without further testing.

Edit: I tested it and explosion lights work again after enabling point lights. So I suggest you just test the next version I will release (should be in the next weeks).

Schmackbolzen

I updated the documentation thread with instructions how to fix problems with DPI scaling.
Also I forgot to mention which format the normal/rougness/metalness maps use. This is also in the documentation now.

Schmackbolzen

I finished beta 2.1: Download beta 2.1

The focus was mainly rendering bugs / improvements.
Changes are:

Fixed rendering bugs with old lighting (affects also starspheres etc.)
Made old lighting very similar to FL lighting (including cubemaps)
Had a nice idea for nebula ambient lighting. It now is complete PBR lighting
Added option to enable point lights for new lighting. Make sure to remove e.g fake planet reflection point lights from FL system inis before enabling it (will look weird, since planets are like suns then). To enable it, set EnablePointLights=1 in config.cfg.

Timmy51m

Well this is a surprise, still slaving away after all these years Schmack. Well done.

Schmackbolzen

Thanks Will continue and currently working on the next features (this time the focus is helping modders).

Timmy51m

@Schmackbolzen Always just nice now and then to see what names are still around doing stuff, happy to see you’re one of them. Take care man, look forward to checking this out sometime.