The rim lighting shader went a long way towards making the fur look soft when lit from behind, but it still looked hard when lit from the side. This problem is so prevalent in modern games that I've started referring to it as "plaster-hair syndrome" -- when hair or fur is sculpted with great detail, but lit as if carved from plaster. This lighting problem is visible on the rabbit's chest here:
What we're missing is a form of subsurface scattering. Fur is translucent, so no individual clump of hair should be opaque enough to produce such sharp shadows. Aubrey and I had discussed a technique for painting soft fur earlier -- blending the fur with multiple blurred copies of itself. This softens the lighting without losing the tiny surface details. If that works for paintings, why not apply that to the normal maps and see if it works in 3D? On the left is the original normal map, followed by two blurred copies, and then the final composite. The final composite is made by taking the original normal map, and layering both of the blurred copies on top at 50% opacity.
By assigning different weights to the blurred normal map copies, we can control how soft we want the fur to look. Here we have three different versions, from hard to soft. If you click to zoom in, you can see that even the softest option still has the fur detail intact.
So does this solve our problem with plaster fur? Let's see how it looks when it's all put together! On the left is the original image from the start of this post, and on the right is the softened version.
Here's the same scene lit from above.
I think that the softened normal maps really help solve the 'plaster' look, and it achieves that with no effect on framerate! It's always nice when we can make Overgrowth look better without using any extra computational resources. Can you think of any examples of games that effectively render fur or hair without using powerful hardware? Some of the most inspirational to me have been Shadow of the Colossus and Final Fantasy XII. (permalink)
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most of Overgrowth's graphical news flashes are "well known" , i think they just enjoy sharing their engine with the public :)
We are going to submit each of our ModDB news updates as papers to SIGGRAPH 2010. The graphics community won't know what hit them!
If they read this moddb page they will :P.
Nice work on everything you guys, are you also working on gameplay or is this just an engine? because i would realy like to see some gameplay prototyping work
I think it will come when they start developing the gameplay more, but they've written about it earlier. And had a fighting prototype in the engine earlier.
You're trying to be smart, don't you?
Its NOT "flashes", its their "how-we-do-stuff" posts.
It may be well known to those who specialise in that field, but as a mapper, writer, concept artist and project planner, alot of these tricks are new to me, its still interesting to know how most things in new technology works even though i dont specialise in it =]
Nope, it's called PR-Whoring ;)
Pardon?
owned
It looks amazing.
Well if you spend as long on designing fun gameplay, as you have on shader tweaks, you might be on to something. I'll keep my eye on Overgrowth
They've already proven they know fun gameplay, go look at Lugaru or even Black Shades, there's lasting appeal I don't see in a lot of other places.
Black Shades was a game by Wolfire? Man, even though that game was extremely simple, it was fun as hell.
looks a lot more natural! good work!
There's a great article online of the making of SotC, was surprised to see how much they seemed to work with LightWave.
Other games? I'd say Peter Jackson's King Kong did a really nice job on the fur effects without crippling performance, I think it scaled pretty well from low end to high end systems too.
Is that a bit of cancer keeping the rope on his shoulders down?
I think it's fur.
Good work again. As always!
When I think of fur rendering, I immediately tend to think of "Conker - Live & Reloaded" on the original Xbox. Considering the age of that particular hardware, Conker's fur and that of his enemies was really impressive and ran very well performance-wise. Easily one of the Xbox's most advanced titles in terms of graphics. I'd like to see a similar method used in Overgrowth, because the blurred normals might look better than the original rendering, but they're still way too flat to actually look like fur.
You know what would be EPIC! Animating them- just a small amount.. just enough to notice that the fur moves slightly due to small wind.
I think due to how close up you'll be getting in the game if you were able to notice those little details of fur actually moving around on a texture, it'd just bring everything to life a lot more. That said it could be a bit of a challenge.
I think you'd get more of a feeling that its fur if it moved just a small bit- at the moment it looks more like Rock due to how static it is. Just a suggestion.
that said though, it looks amazing.
i agree with this, im guessing it will be third person so most other characters you wont realy get very upclose and personal with, however the player character should have this kind of detail, animated fur =] im totally with this
Have you guys considered implementing the fur shader? At least for the tails or something. That could look really good.
The fur shader is absolutely horrible when working with realistic themes. The only times it worked effectively was in cartoony games such as conker. I say don't use the shader just for the sake of it. Unless it looks like Hair Shaders from Maya or Max, just don't bother.
Hmm, this is an interesting issue to tackle. The softening definitely makes a significant difference, and hopefully you'll find a solution to make fur stand out from the body slightly if possible. Either way, great work!