Dev Update 26-Jan-2017

Hello there!

I just finished the third player character! Phew! This is an in-engine, realtime screenshot:

Pretty amazing result considering when I think six, seven years ago at the university, we had to wait minutes for rendering a single frame like that!
And this is an actual ingame shot of the latest protagonist, the pilot:

Getting my rendering right:

So when I started working on the player characters and tried to feed my textures into Unitys standard shader, I failed to get the results that I was expecting. I recognized that it would make sense to take some time to actually read the documentation first 😉 So I learned about Unitys physical based rendering approach and with some little hints from Sascha (thank you, really!) on how to work with the textures color channels I was finally able to get the materials working. These sheets here are really handy also.

Now when you start reading the docs, you will also very likely read this page about HDR Rendering. What I learned from it was: If you want to have all the nice rendering, you should really have your project using deferred rendering path and also work in linear color space. Which is not set by default. Yep! So what is linear color space anyways? Turns out your screen screws you over all the time. And your digicam also. Usually all that media works in gamma color space, which is basically dark colors are saved more precise than bright ones. However rendering on your GPU is done linear. So when you work in gamma space, you will get different results as if you are working in linear space. Turns out lighting is pretty shit in gamma space! This site explains it in detail, a must read!

See you next time! 🙂
Philipp