What is physically correct lighting all about?
/ lighting, production

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/60638/what-is-physically-correct-lighting-all-about

 

2012-08 Nathan Reed wrote:

Physically-based shading means leaving behind phenomenological models, like the Phong shading model, which are simply built to “look good” subjectively without being based on physics in any real way, and moving to lighting and shading models that are derived from the laws of physics and/or from actual measurements of the real world, and rigorously obey physical constraints such as energy conservation.

 

For example, in many older rendering systems, shading models included separate controls for specular highlights from point lights and reflection of the environment via a cubemap. You could create a shader with the specular and the reflection set to wildly different values, even though those are both instances of the same physical process. In addition, you could set the specular to any arbitrary brightness, even if it would cause the surface to reflect more energy than it actually received.

 

In a physically-based system, both the point light specular and the environment reflection would be controlled by the same parameter, and the system would be set up to automatically adjust the brightness of both the specular and diffuse components to maintain overall energy conservation. Moreover you would want to set the specular brightness to a realistic value for the material you’re trying to simulate, based on measurements.

 

Physically-based lighting or shading includes physically-based BRDFs, which are usually based on microfacet theory, and physically correct light transport, which is based on the rendering equation (although heavily approximated in the case of real-time games).

 

It also includes the necessary changes in the art process to make use of these features. Switching to a physically-based system can cause some upsets for artists. First of all it requires full HDR lighting with a realistic level of brightness for light sources, the sky, etc. and this can take some getting used to for the lighting artists. It also requires texture/material artists to do some things differently (particularly for specular), and they can be frustrated by the apparent loss of control (e.g. locking together the specular highlight and environment reflection as mentioned above; artists will complain about this). They will need some time and guidance to adapt to the physically-based system.

 

On the plus side, once artists have adapted and gained trust in the physically-based system, they usually end up liking it better, because there are fewer parameters overall (less work for them to tweak). Also, materials created in one lighting environment generally look fine in other lighting environments too. This is unlike more ad-hoc models, where a set of material parameters might look good during daytime, but it comes out ridiculously glowy at night, or something like that.

 

Here are some resources to look at for physically-based lighting in games:

 

SIGGRAPH 2013 Physically Based Shading Course, particularly the background talk by Naty Hoffman at the beginning. You can also check out the previous incarnations of this course for more resources.

 

Sébastien Lagarde, Adopting a physically-based shading model and Feeding a physically-based shading model

 

And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Physically-Based Rendering by Pharr and Humphreys, an amazing reference on this whole subject and well worth your time, although it focuses on offline rather than real-time rendering.

Little Hero
/ design

Light properties
/ lighting, photography, reference

How It Works – Issue 114
https://www.howitworksdaily.com/

Lorene Barioz – animal drawings
/ design

Pantheon of the War – The colossal war painting
/ design

Four years in the making with the help of 150 artists, in commemoration of WW1.

edition.cnn.com/style/article/pantheon-de-la-guerre-wwi-painting/index.html

A panoramic canvas measuring 402 feet (122 meters) around and 45 feet (13.7 meters) high. It contained over 5,000 life-size portraits of war heroes, royalty and government officials from the Allies of World War I.

Partial section upload:

 

gamasutra – The cost of games
/ production

www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180117/313211/The_cost_of_games.php

Think of the whole industry as a mature market. We’re running out of platforms shifts that reset costs.

Get good at systemic design, design for retention, design for community. Basically, think like an MMO developer. Yeah, that means designing everything as games as a service.

Embrace procedur-ality.

But also embrace brand-building and marketing, because you ain’t gonna survive without it. This market is going keep getting more crowded.

About green screens
/ colour, lighting, production

hackaday.com/2015/02/07/how-green-screen-worked-before-computers/

 

www.newtek.com/blog/tips/best-green-screen-materials/

 

www.chromawall.com/blog//chroma-key-green

 

 

Chroma Key Green, the color of green screens is also known as Chroma Green and is valued at approximately 354C in the Pantone color matching system (PMS).

 

Chroma Green can be broken down in many different ways. Here is green screen green as other values useful for both physical and digital production:

 

Green Screen as RGB Color Value: 0, 177, 64
Green Screen as CMYK Color Value: 81, 0, 92, 0
Green Screen as Hex Color Value: #00b140
Green Screen as Websafe Color Value: #009933

 

Chroma Key Green is reasonably close to an 18% gray reflectance.

 

Illuminate your green screen with an uniform source with less than 2/3 EV variation.
The level of brightness at any given f-stop should be equivalent to a 90% white card under the same lighting.