"Soft" shader, or, how do I get this skin-lighting effect?

BlinksTale · 2013-06-22T01:52:17

You guys always know how to pull off these fancy tricks, so perhaps you can help me with this. Nintendo's newest round of games all have this amazing "soft" look to them visually, no more hard light-to-dark gradients. Instead, there's backlighting or that layered skin effect, underlighting, *something*. That's what I'm trying to figure out, and then how to do it. Examples: Kirby here, and maybe Pikachu's chest just under his arm. These two cube men, with some ridiculously soft lighting/shadowing system, although I think it might be different from the others. The back of this girls head, just under her hairline. It definitely glows, but only at the edge of her head. Here Pascal, the red otter, has the glow all around his head. The girl also has it, but on her jawline. So I'm guessing the glow is a reflection, due to what fancy-schmancy art class still life taught me. ^art skewl Although I'm also inclined to think it's a skin transparency layering mimicking thing, like the PS4 demo by David Cage (only significantly cheaper on the processor, I'm sure). And I still think that Cube Men one is a different shader/lighting/thing altogether, but I don't know how to describe it compared to the others. So, thoughts? Directions? Help? I want my game to have friendly, soft, and welcoming visuals. So far, all of the above do an excellent job of that, so I'd like to learn what I can from them. Many thanks!

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming

Started by BlinksTale June 19, 2013 01:39 AM

9 comments, last by marcClintDion 10 years, 10 months ago

marcClintDion

435

June 22, 2013 01:52 AM

Half Life 2 used a "Half Lambert" diffuse term

Yup, another excellent formula. I saw this half life formula described as "the dot product from the Lambertian model is scaled by ½, add ½ and squared"

I interpreted this as the following -> ((NdotL1 * 0.5) + 0.5) * ((NdotL1 * 0.5) + 0.5)

The model looks very similar as with the above RenderMan equation but this one better retains the illusion of depth. Thanks for the tip.

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"Soft" shader, or, how do I get this skin-lighting effect?

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"Soft" shader, or, how do I get this skin-lighting effect?

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