roadtovostok

Specular Contrast (Shader feature)

Added 2023-08-31 15:38:59 +0000 UTC

Hi!

I have a development rule that I can't make PBR (physically based rendering) materials yet since I want to maintain a good development speed and managing PBR as a concept is not necessary for this project yet.

For Public Demo 2, I still wanted to increase the visual quality of the game, so I added a thing called "specular contrast" (also known as specular highlights / smoothness) which utilizes the existing base textures and provides reflective highlights through specific shader contrast technique.

For those who are more interested about the technical details, here's a short tech explanation:

1. Typically PBR-rendering utilizes additional Rougness / Smoothness / Metallic maps that provide black and white pixel-based information to the shader. This information is rather simple, white pixel is reflective or smooth, black pixel is not and grey values are somewhere between.

2. I wanted to skip this whole additional texture thing, so I "faked" this same principle inside the shader where I fully desaturated the base color texture and added contrast / exposure level thresholds to get a good looking black and white detail input for that PBR-output which would normally use those PBR-maps.

This technique is not realistic or visually correct in every scenario but it's close enough. In the screenshot, you can for example see how the arm model, tank and weapon look more realistic when it's raining and wet.

I also tweaked the rendering a bit so there's now really nice temporal-antialiasing for all weapons when previously that anti-aliasing method was only used for environment.

- Antti (Developer)