It’s just confusing to me why you’re using BGE - you consistently complain about it. If you haven’t done much work, it’s not hard to switch engines and you get the render you want for less work. Even if your programmer has done some work, Unreal and Unity have a bunch of templates to help you get started, there’s literally no reason not to switch. It just seems like you’re making your life harder for no reason.
You said earlier that you’re no expert so what’s all this lecturing. It’s not as complicated as you think to make next generation game models. You’ll need an albedo, specular, normal and gloss map. But even with these maps you won’t achieve a next gen look to your model if the engine can’t do it, it’s not my fault the knight in the first screenshot looks kind of crappy, it’s blender’s fault. The only thing I’m sure can be improved is the metal material, but that metal still wouldn’t compare to what’s possible in next gen game engines. I’m not complaining about it, just pointing it out to you, since you’re under the illusion that it’s my fault the model in the first post don’t look like some next generation game.
I guess you’re a bit new to realtime graphics, but you can definitely make a model look really good and realistic in bge by using techniques like baking normals, using cubemaps, specular maps and masking different materials together.
Baking normals, lol? I’m not familiar with cubemaps, are you talking about pbr, physical based rendering? If there’s a way to enable that in blender I would love to know how. He has got specular maps and two different materials, the materials aren’t perfect but yeah beyond that there’s not much one can do.
Baking normals from a high poly model to a low poly model makes a huge difference. Its done almost everytime as high poly models are just not feasible to use in games.
And yeah look into cubemaps. They are used to make reflective materials so like in your example, the shaders aren’t that good. metal doesn’t look like metal at all. adding a pre-calculated cubemap will make it look more reflective.
Also manipulating roughness through specular maps makes a huge difference too. The point is all this can be achieved in the blender game engine you just need to know how to do it. I’d say you can get some pretty next gen looking results.
I had enough…
I didn’t sign up for this forum to see someone bashing the engine this forum is about. If I wanted to see people bashing and crap-posting about things I would sign up for Reddit; (This is not only directed to you, but everyone who did and currently does this).
Indeed, if you are not going to adapt your skills from PBR to non-PBR (which BGE is for now), why bother? (specially if you are going to friggin’ complain in every single post)
You have to learn at least the Phong shading model, and how to fake things. That’s what we did it before PBR. And in BGE’s case, still do.
I didn’t start “complaining” about how bad the blender game engine is, I started this thread only because it would be nice to have an animator do animations in our little project. Then the thread was hijacked and I had to correct a guy or several guys who told me the reason my model don’t look next gen is because I’ve done something wrong and it’s not the fault of blender’s game engine.
I know everything you people know and probably more, you’re not telling me something I don’t know. What it seems that you don’t understand is that blender isn’t capable of creating next generation graphics like unreal for example. As you say blender hasn’t got pbr and many other features of better engines. Pop this knight into a better engine and he would look like something out of a next generation game. The main reason he don’t is because the metal don’t really look like metal, there are other things such as subdermis maps, translucancy maps, fuzz maps for realistic skin and fur. Blender’s lighting, not too fancy.
Also I’ve got to admit that his skin diffuse texture isn’t too detailed, but it doesn’t really matter since you’ll barely notice it in blender anyway. I asked for an animator I was told to teach you about the difference between blender’s game engine and next generation game engines. Are you happy or are you going to whine some more?
(I’m not familiar with blender plugins that enhances the game engine, or forks of the blender game engine, all I’ve got is the official program from the website so everything that is not that I’m not concerned with.)
your model is well sculpted, however you don’t have any reflection map or a reflection mask on the metal
using a stencil that is scratches and edge wear to mask the reflection results in a very nice metalic surface,
if you use upbge you can generate real cube map reflection textures to then pass through a stencil for masking, and you can use refraction soon, and it looks like you can use mip maps for roughness soon as well,
I’m not trying to “lecture” you - we were all trying to help by giving suggestions and showing videos.
Multiple users have showed you how to make your model look better in BGE, yet you keep acting like you’ve hit the limit. Yes, it’s harder to make your model look nice and yes, it may never look as a good as it might in a next gen game engine; but what we’ve done is just give you advice on how to make your current model in the BGE look better. Again, this is a BGE sub-forum.
You said your model looked crappy, so many of us have given you suggestions and advice. This is not meant to be rude: let go of your ego for a few seconds - you could have made your model look better, it’s possible, and that’s all on you. It’s your fault the model doesn’t look the best it can on the BGE. It’s not your fault when you’ve hit the limitations and, so far, you haven’t even come close to even doing that.
This is my advice, once again:
If you don’t like the BGE, switch - your programmer shouldn’t have a hard time.
If you don’t want to switch, for some reason, then take people’s advice on how to make your model look better.
If you don’t want to do any of the above - that’s where I’m confused.
A reflection map? Do you mean a specular map? Never heard of a reflection map, gloss maps and specular maps are used in modern games. Is a reflection map some ancient relic from before pbr or something. Here’s his helmet without and with the specular map. He definitely got a specular map, anyway all those forks are very nice blueprint random but are we using those. I’m only using the game engine that comes with blender.
A reflection mask is very simple to do, you just darken areas in the specular map that you don’t want to emit as much specular light. Done that in his helmet too, notice how his face has no specular light but do without the spec map.
It has only a diffuse, normal and spec map. Now let’s see what this exact same setup looks like in a modern engine and that helmet hasn’t even got a gloss map or other maps which it would make sense to create in a modern engine. But for blender…not really necessary. I don’t think I am to blame for blender’s outdated graphics, now with all those plugins you might be able to achieve something that looks more next gen and if that’s the case great.
At some point I recall ripping a model from one of the witcher games to look at how they made hair for their models. A witcher model in blender’s game engine looked like a ps2 game. It’s though but let’s face it, even the greatest artist couldn’t make something in blender’s game engine look next gen.
Here’s the helmet in a better engine. Rectreate the helmet below in blender’s game engine and you would prove me wrong.
reflection maps are called light probes in some engines or reflection probes,
its a cube map of the environment rendered in real time or gathered from a static grid, and they are cutting edge.
older engines used a static cube map that was intentionally blurry to fake reflection.
mirrors edge 2 uses a static cube map grid for static objects that includes a depth pass, then dynamic objects all reside on 1 render layer and are used to make the realtime cube map that is rendered over the interpolated static grid reflection probe,
what does this mean? accurate reflections in real time with a lower cpu/gpu cost
go online and type ‘reflection texture’ and you will see many metalic looking blurry images,
grab one and then instead of setting it to uv, set it to reflection
you can also use a matcap and set it to normal instead of uv*
edit: check this map out - try mapping this to reflection on a sphere
Sorry guys I’m not in the mood for this, it’s always something that grinds the gears. It was fun while it lasted blueprint, you can use the knight model, good luck.
Alright maybe I spoke too early, let’s not give up just yet. But guys, I don’t really need your advice, I need an animator, that’s why this thread was created.
The tension of this thread looks to be elevating just a tad bit. @Leinadien I should warn you that (even IF you might be right about bge and some of its capabilities) you shouldn’t say these things too much on a form 100% fully devoted to bge, it’s like going to unreal forms and saying that it doesn’t have what it takes (and we all know it does), the reactions would be the same, people would start to argue and show evidence that it does. If you want an animator, just talk about that and if people try to go off topic and discuss bge and what it can and can’t do, ignore it and try to focus on finding one. Come to think of it you may find more people willing to help animate only in another part of this site. I would suggest looking there.
