My Shader Looks Lame (with pic)

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2 comments, last by ginkgo 12 years, 3 months ago
Hi guys,

I'm trying to render blocks that look maybe like porcelin; solid colored with a high gloss clear coat. I really don't know what to do. I know I need a reflection map but I'm not sure what kind and how it should look, I don't have the type of scene where I can make an envirnoment map because there really isn't an envirnoment, it's just a background texture with objects rendered on top from a fixed camera position.

I'm using a basic Phong shader because that's all I really know right now. It looks like the blocks were just plopped onto the background (because they were), I want it to look photorealistic or at least like the blocks belong with the background. I want it to look more professional.

Any advice about how to make it look better would be appreciated. I should probably be using a more sophisticated shader model right ?

Take a look:

blocksi.jpg

PS - they don't look half bad in the image but fullscreen looks unprofessional
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Using multiple lights that are positioned correctly can be of great importance when doing good looking scenes, in the real world there almost never is only a single lightsource which influences a scene
Since you're using brightly colored blocks it would also be a good idea to use some indirect lighting, even if it is very subtle
You could also add image based lighting to create the feel of the blocks being in a certain environment, and you could use some subtle bump mapping to add details to the blocks themselves

I gets all your texture budgets!

Hi, thanks for the advice.

I'll try adding multiple lights and see how that looks.

I did a little research into image based lighting and it looks amazing, I really need to learn that stuff.

What do you mean by indirect lighting ?

I'd like to add some bump mapping but my models have all their edges camphored and I have no idea how to set the proper UV values for a texture/normalmap.

Thanks again.
You can create a glossy highlight by clamping the phong-lobe. https://lva.cg.tuwie...ossy-highlights

Image based lighting is even simpler and creates great results: https://lva.cg.tuwien.ac.at/cg1/wiki/doku.php?id=students:image-based-shading This works as long as you don't change the viewing angle.

You can also do reflection mapping with sphere maps: https://lva.cg.tuwien.ac.at/cg1/wiki/doku.php?id=students:sphere-mapping

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