Material Shaders and Scene Lighting (Patreon)

With the release of Gravure Studio a little less than a month ago, I introduced a new shader model, scene lighting and post processing. The consequence of my decision broke compatibility with vanilla and/or third party models, by nature of making them far too bright. 

In spite of this, I made the decision to go forward anyways because I am naturally always prioritizing the look and appearance of Gravure Studio models over Vanilla models. Regardless, I released a LITE version that had lighting tailored to Vanilla and third party models, as I understand it would be cruel and unusual to make people not be able to use what most consider to be the defacto companion mod to any third party mod for DOA5. 

However, I have figured out why, more specifically, the changes to lighting I made in  Gravure Studio broke compatibility with vanilla models. I speculated on why this was happening in a previous article, and I was correct, however I didn't realize the actual exponent was right under my nose. If I had done a bit more trial and error testing I would have discovered this, but alas, it's a learning process. 

Diffuse2 is an exponent for the ambient lighting value in scenes. It's not a hidden value or anything like that. It was much more simple than I had imagined.

Diffuse 2 is the material shader (applied to models), and Ambient is applied to scenes, to control the ambient lighting. If Diffuse 2 is at 0 in all values, the ambient lighting will not affect the model, and vise versa. 

It didn't even occur to me that this could be the case, because the Diffuse2 value has much less effect on versus scenes (as in when you're playing the game as a normal fighting game), and literally no effect in character select. The idea that the ambient lighting value wasn't being used, or being used so sparingly when it's so important to make a scene look correct never even crossed my mind, and indeed, if there was no ambient lighting at all, it would look very wrong. 

However, there was a substitute being used. 

These values are, to be frank, bizarre and unusual, and while I don't understand fully why and how they work, I know two things distinctly about them. A: They can substitute ambient lighting, and B: They suck.

Why do I say that you might ask? I'll demonstrate.

Now, before you point it out. Yes, I have twisted Ayane's head backward in an inhuman position in the second image in order to demonstrate the problem (not because I'm a sadist). Both of these images are the same scene, and the same scene lighting, but with Ambient Sub 1 turned up to 1, 1, 1 (RGB). You'll notice the first image is much brighter than the second. This is because, for some insane reason, the Ambient Sub lights are tracked to the orientation of the head. That is insanely stupid, and it looks weird in motion. That's why I don't use them. Ambient Sub 1 faces 180 degrees behind where the face is oriented, and Sub 2 faces toward. You might think that setting them both to equal values would mimic the effect of the base ambient light value, but it does not.

However, those values do not use Diffuse2 as an exponent, so scenes that use Ambient Sub in place of Ambient, GS and non GS models will look about the same, but scenes that use the better Ambient shader will naturally have a significant disparity. 

So what's the solution to this problem? Well, naturally I will have to go back and edit every scene, and every material shader, armed with this new knowledge in order to make both GS and non GS models compatible in the same scenes.

This is tedious, time consuming work, but it must be done, and do it I shall. It's not as fun and glamorous as making new scenes and new costumes, but the longer I wait to fix this, the more work it creates for me later. 

So now what do GS and non GS models look like in this same scene when I've corrected the Diffuse 2 exponent and adjusted the ambient light value accordingly? 

Again, not perfect, but the vanilla models are now tolerable, albeit too contrasty. A hell of a lot better than this at least.

Fixing this problem, again, will be tedious and time consuming, but sometimes that's what it takes to make an endproduct spitshined and polished.