Got the lighting correct, but I decided to go overboard with the saturation for the lulz.
The skybox looks amazing to me. I might just be crazy though. Lol
Here’s what the map looks like with the fixed lighting. 
25 Likes
Looks to me like the voxel light grid is just updating slowly, doesn’t seem like it’s effect related. I’ve seen this happen in one of our games too, particularly in an area that is dark and has a lot of light sources. The old lighting has done that for years, particularly in cases where your camera/character is moving fast. Maybe this could be improved on though?
5 Likes
If you look at the first gif, when the effect is enabled at first the appearance looks better but it also changes the colours of the lights, which isn’t necessary.
3 Likes
It does that because the new lighting handles things differently, and includes a wider range of capabilities by doing so. You need to adjust the settings on the lights to get the look you want when you switch to the new lighting.
3 Likes
It is absolutely necessary to change the colors of lights and how the post-processing works, particularly how neon looks. This is described in the article linked from the original post. It’s not “just” a lighting option, it’s a whole new HDR pipeline and changes were necessary to make everything compatible.
We believe that with minimal changes the new lighting already makes most games look better; some games will require a bit of tuning. With the right tuning you can get significantly better results than the old system allowed you to - which is why we consider this to be out of beta.
6 Likes
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll mess around with this
3 Likes
I can sense more realistic colors and better contrast between shadows, looking forward for the Phase 2, its gonna be awesome.
Legacy:
Voxel:
Legacy:
Voxel:
28 Likes
Loving the way the new lighting changes everything! It’s a massive leap in graphical fidelity.
Out of curiosity, what kind of approach would you recommend for HDR in OpenGL? Have any suggestions on where to start looking? Staring at a wall of technical papers on a search results page is kind of daunting when I don’t know where to start. I have a pipeline built for a Phong lighting model with deferred shading that I’ve been wanting to add it to for context.
2 Likes
We have just enabled two important fixes that were mentioned in the original post but didn’t make it in time for the release:
- Water shading in Technology=Voxel mode changed to fix several bugs that resulted in severe visual issues for high Brightness values. We are now using somewhat more physically accurate equations as a result.
- Bloom is now using a linear color space which results in nicer falloff that looks more realistic. This screenshot is with Bloom.Size=56, note that you can customize bloom/neon glare size using this parameter (the default is 24).
This concludes the phase 1 as well as the lighting updates for the year on production 
We’re still trying to release a new Studio build for phase 3 (FIB v16) before EOY. If any bugs are discovered in phase 1, we’ll fix them early next year.
33 Likes
Going to post this here even thought it should probably be in a engine bugs or something similar. Please move if necessary.
I noticed a bug with the voxel lighting and terrain today
While updating some maps with a winter theme I noticed that the terrain “Glacier” has an issue. First off, I went and put every terrain type down. The background is the snow terrain.
Pictured is at brightness 10 with the new voxel lighting.
The map is usually at 0.
Notice with brightness set to 0 we see two terrain types still ‘glowing’. Lava, which is to be expected, and glacier. The part of the map I wanted to use glacier on needs to stay pitch black except for the few spots where my spot light hits it and this glowing that it does just doesn’t seem right especially considering that ice (glacier) would need light in the environment to reflect light anyway.
3 Likes
I wanna paste picture too. Lovely high contrast and warmth and my floors used to have these strange banding artifacts that are now gone.
25 Likes
It looks really good! New lighting engine is hard to set up, but once you do, it looks amazing in my opinion.
3 Likes
Yeah I think it’s a bug in the texture. Not related to new lighting but we should fix this.
8 Likes
I think phase 2 (and 3) “performant shadows” include fixes to lingering shadows (some lingering for many more seconds):
-and I’m not sure that’s the same thing as my previous post (about the shadow/lighting distance cap, so that’s why I brought it up)
7 Likes
My place is a little strange - Not that the lighting is weird, but that it looks almost exactly the same.
Here is Legacy with Color Correction and Bloom effect:
Here is Voxel, but Color Correction and Bloom effects have been disabled.
The only real difference I can see is that the decals for the LOD buildings in the back are a little weird looking. Here’s another comparison:
Legacy:
Voxel:
In all honesty, Voxel doesn’t seem to look as good as Legacy in this case.
Here’s the last one:
Legacy:
Voxel:
I guess this is one of the weird cases where Voxel doesn’t look as good as legacy, but other than this I’ve had great experiences with Voxel lighting, so keep up the good work.
EDIT:
Ok so I fixed some of the weird yellowish stuff on the buildings (they were made of a yellow neon part with a decal of transparency 0.1 stuck on them) by changing the decal transparency to 0, but now the roofs of the buildings looks kinda strange because the neon glows way too much. Here’s a screenshot:
Hmmm
22 Likes
Since recent you need to adjust your Bloom(?) settings to change the neon shine.
Have you tried that?
2 Likes
Besides tweaking the Bloom settings, I rather suggest altering the neon material colors individually, that could certainly take up some hours if not days of work though.
But, since the new way of how neon gets rendered it finally allows much more diversity in actual color & glow strength by cautiously adjusting the color HUE and Values.
The Value finally reaches from just the color being barely to optimally visible in the dark (without any glow to just a very subtle around it) up to those huge glow radius you are experiencing.
Changes in the colors Hue are now much more intense & different too, leading to interesting results if properly picked.
For the Rooftops I’d suggest setting the value to anything under 200 or 170, & Hues to a bit warmer & darker shade + lowering the Saturation carefully.
Especially noteworthy to say, due to the way the new neon and bloom colors work ,you do NOT longer have to, or actually should no longer need to, rely on lowering the individual neon intensity by tweaking the parts transparency.
One further advantage is that the usage of less transparent parts could improve overall performance a tiny little bit as far as I once heard…
1 Like
@zeuxcg
Sorry to bother you during your break, but there’s this “severe” bug with the new Voxel system which ppl just discovered, it apparently produces some weird extreme under saturated rendering for outdoorlighting, really hard to explain just see for yourself :
BTW warning ! I’m making this post primarily since those strange rendering glitches could cause Epileptic seizures !
4 Likes
I’d rather they keep this, it’s amazing.
8 Likes