So I Think I See Where Pbr Has It's Problems With Black

[NightSniper]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=508295710

 

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=508295701

 

 

Apparently the lighting differences are what causes the intense rejection of dark black when PBR is present. So all that DE has to fix would be either the shaders with PBR itself, or change how it reacts to world lighting. Preferably both. Hope this small uneducated guess will shed some new light on why PBR hates black so much. If not, well, just fix PBR already DE I freaking hate grey

 

[AdunSaveMe]

Technically it is black. It's just the material, really.

 

If it had a more cloth-like texture or something more matte-ish it'd probably look blacker.

 

Nice Ash btw

Edited August 29, 2015 by AdunSaveMe

[NightSniper]

Technically it is black. It's just the material, really.

 

If it had a more cloth-like texture or something more matte-ish it'd probably look blacker.

 

Nice Ash btw

Thank you my good man. Yeah, it is technically the material, but it is also due to the shaders that they use to determine how certain things look in different intensities of light. I think, again not a game programmer.

[egregiousRac]

That is exactly how it should look when painted black. As every designer knows, nothing should ever be true black. That removes all surface definition.

 

 

Also, that is sort of what happens when light hits an object. Few materials actually absorb 99.9% of light.

[AdunSaveMe]

That is exactly how it should look when painted black. As every designer knows, nothing should ever be true black. That removes all surface definition.

 

 

Also, that is sort of what happens when light hits an object. Few materials actually absorb 99.9% of light.

Yes, technically it's how it SHOULD look. Maybe. My keyboard is darker than that.

 

And regardless of how it should look in reality, this is a game, with customization no less, and this is somewhat restricting to that customization, giving viability to the arguments against it. It just needs to be a bit darker is all.

[egregiousRac]

Here is a quick material demo I whipped up to demonstrate the issue:

 

Every one of those objects on the left is true black. The only change is that they get rougher as they go left. The farthest is perfectly smooth, and looks totally black with reflections.

 

The thing is that as it gets rougher the reflections blur out, lighting up more of the surface. This makes it look more grey, even in soft lighting conditions such as these. Warframe uses much harsher lighting than this demo, which causes it to exhibit this even more so.

 

I would guess that Ash has sort of a middle roughness, which causes the defined grayness. His armor may actually be slightly lightened as well, which is more of an issue.

 

Edit: Here is the same demo in a different environment to show how harsher environments magnify the graying.

 

And showing how the blending looks by using multicolored lights:

Edited August 29, 2015 by egregiousRac

[NightSniper]

*snip*

Very informative of you, thanks for the little demo. The thing that I don't really get however is that the immortal skin for ash can indeed get "true black", where it is black all the time, but still looks like a material. PBR, on the other hand, can't get "true black". That is where I get confused as to why they can't fix PBR to allow us to have actual black on our warframes and weapons

[egregiousRac]

Very informative of you, thanks for the little demo. The thing that I don't really get however is that the immortal skin for ash can indeed get "true black", where it is black all the time, but still looks like a material. PBR, on the other hand, can't get "true black". That is where I get confused as to why they can't fix PBR to allow us to have actual black on our warframes and weapons

 

The immortal skin is using the old shaders, which don't function the same at all. All the old system has are settings for color and highlight strength. This makes it possible to have any color, as it is lit in a very primitive direct light-absorption model. When black is put into the color slot of this shader all lighting is absorbed, leaving you with only the highlights.

Any metallics are then running on a separate shader. 

 

The new system uses three inputs; color, roughness, and metalness. Roughness determines the roughness of the micro surface (below the visible detail level), which is what I demo'd up above. The system has both highlights and reflections, which are blurred and made fainter with roughness. The incorporation of reflections on everything causes it to be slightly lit no matter what.

 

 

Looking at the materials of Ash Prime specifically, I notice a couple things. First off, all of his armor that is colored by channel A is quite smooth, which makes reflections very visible.

Secondly, if you are talking about the body being black or not, this discussion was irrelevant. Ash Prime's body is NOT PBR'd! Only his head and extra bits (armor plates, back thing, etc) are. The lightness is entirely because of how he was textured.

 

Colors are applied by using a mask to overlay the selected color onto the texture on the left. Most of them are quite dark so that they will take whatever color the player selects. In order to minimize differences between the non-PBR body and the PBR armor, they made the texture much lighter than normal. If the body were actually PBR'd then it would look darker, but this was done to fake the softer lighting of PBR.

Edited August 30, 2015 by egregiousRac