What would be the fastest way to bake lighting into vcolors these days? Was it done manually back then?
>>998624Use modern lighting
by...baking the lighting...
>>998624Yes it was made manually, but since there is not many vertices it was more an artist process than a tedious one
>>998624Ahh, this looks like a really cool way to store lightning information, the only big downside is it basically requires vertices on on object geometry to be uniform grid. Maybe my skills with decimate and remesh are lacking, but for me it seems very hard to model everything like that. It's basically perfect topology but also uniform vertices on topology.
>>998625For some reason I'm never able to get the lighting "right" for interiors, it feels like I'm fighting against my point lights. Probably a skill issue but on paper I feel like these vcolors would allow me to have more control on the mood I want to give to an interior.>>998650Yeah that wouldn't surprise me, I was assuming it was a mix of both (auto + artist behind) but pure artist work wouldn't surprise me either>>998690Yeah for sure, they also "cheat" by having shadow meshes. I really dig the atmosphere that it's able to convey though, see picrel. I might try it for fun, I guess it's just unlit + diffuse + vcolor blending
https://youtu.be/xscKrPLpsr4?si=mCn_tLHPklfEXAC2&t=216
>>998704I'm sure that if someone were a master of lighting, they would be able to create whatever mood they wanted with whatever lighting system is available to them, but there's a reason most new games look pretty, but fail to capture the mood that older games have even though the artists in question are skilled. Even if you look at old paintings, the lighting isn't 100% physically accurate, which contributes to the dreamlike "surreal" atmosphere they have, even in non-surrealist works. Modern lighting tools give less control than painting does, whether it be traditional, or vertices in a mesh.
>>998705Based>>998709Completely agree anon
>>998709> Even if you look at old paintings, the lighting isn't 100% physically accurate, which contributes to the dreamlike "surreal" atmosphere they have, even in non-surrealist works. Modern lighting tools give less control than painting does, whether it be traditional, or vertices in a mesh.In painting there are styles like realism which try to be as photographic as possible, and there are tons of styles that ignore realism on purpose and do whatever. When saying old paintings you sound like everybody tries to paint light realistically nowadays. That's not the case at all. Every minute a lot of purposefully non-photorelistically-lighted paintings are being drawn. I think photorealistic lighting in paintings is more of a niche actually. Modern AAA games often are generic and boring at all levels, including visuals, because they try to play safe and do the most generic boring PBR lighting stuff looking like everywhere else.
>>998624the dev of Deep State made a good guide on it, hope this helps https://imgur.com/a/vertex-color-basics-blender-to-unity-IBvI6HI
>>998624You need to turn off textures to properly paint vertex colors.
>>998709I think you're underestimating how much control you actually have in PBR
>>998906Awesome, thanks a lot anon.
>>998915If you go and remap color and brightness curves of shadows in shader depending on camera angle, and still use Principled BSDF at the end, does this still count as PBR?
>>998624What are you asking, OP? The fastest way?Baking vertex colours on a low poly scene like that is gonna take less than a second.Are you asking how to bake vertex colours in Blender? Fucking google it, it isn't hard.Was it done manually back then? Probably. If you are aren't artistically retarded you'll get better results painting than baking, but the bake might be a good starting point to paint from.When you're painting, switch between textured and untextured views regularly. It will give you a better sense of what is going on with the colours.
>>998906just tried this, worked nicely I think. just dropped some colored lights in and went for it in the bake panel in cycles, in Output, set Target to Active Color Attribute otherwise it doesn't seem to work also in Light Paths, Max Bounces, set the total to 1, diffuse to 1, the rest can be zero including direct and indirect light. keep filters glossy on 1, turn caustics reflective and refractive off (basically just copy the settings in the images in the imgur)
I decided to use vertex colors for texture masks. Works pretty good so far. Black/White for 2 textures, RGB for 3 textures.Maybe alpha can be used for 4th, but that's going to be harder to use since you won't see it visually properly outside of material preview or rendered mode.
Love seeing a fellow DQ Chad studying those games.