8 replies to this topic

[riuthamus]

 

In this image you see our current setup on the left. The issue is that speculars are not blocked by objects that are in the direct path of the light. One might suggest that shadows could fix this, but the issue is that the shadows only cause the specular to be less intense but does not remove the specular from the blocked areas. Is there some way to fix this?

[Yourself]

I'm not aware of any technique to fix these kinds of issues without using a global illumination system.

 

I have seen dark lights (a light source that will decrease the intensity of the lighting (or only the specular) within its radius) to improve this problem but it doesn't take it completely away (and you need to place those lights or write an automatic system).

 

Perhaps you could modify SSAO? Instead of 'just darkening the corners', you could use this value to modify the specular.

Edited by Yourself, 28 February 2013 - 03:23 AM.

[EWClay]

You will need to separate the direct and ambient light contributions. The specular only comes from the direct part, so if that is blocked specular should be removed completely.

[Telanor]

How do you do that with a deferred renderer? Ambient and diffuse are precombined.

[EWClay]

It makes no difference with a deferred renderer. Specular is calculated from each direct light before they are combined with the diffuse channel.

There is another, different way to get it wrong with deferred shading, which is to add specular lighting to the diffuse buffer, which means it gets multiplied by the albedo, but that's not what's happening here.

Edit: I'm referring to deferred lighting above. Full deferred shading does not combine lights into a buffer.

[Telanor]

They're calculated separately but at the point of calculation you don't have the shadow information to determine if the specular should be added or not. It's not until the final composite stage that you have that data, at which point specular and ambient are already combined.

[EWClay]

They're calculated separately but at the point of calculation you don't have the shadow information to determine if the specular should be added or not. It's not until the final composite stage that you have that data, at which point specular and ambient are already combined.

In that case, I can only suggest doing the lighting calculations in a different way so that shadowing information is available. This isn't normally an issue with deferred lighting.

[kalle_h]

Can you post shadowing code? It should be done when lighting is done.

[Telanor]

Ah, so the shadows are supposed to be added into the lighting buffer output apparently. Since I wasn't the one who set this up originally I hadn't really done much research into the compositing stage of shadows, so I just assumed it was normal to add them in during the final gbuffer pass. Thanks for the help guys.