Inner Circle Update for July 17 2017!

Hey again!

We’ve spent a lot of time this week learning new techniques based on what Ubercharge has passed onto us from his knowledge of physically based rendering, and I have a lot to show off from those experiments. It’s been a busy week for me personally because I had to go out of town twice and had a family medical emergency in the middle of it all, so while I didn’t get a lot done on character stuff I still managed to accomplish quite a bit given the circumstances. We have Ubercharge set up on our Google Drive now and he’s in the middle of syncing; he probably has another few days to go with 150,000 files remaining to sync. Once he’s done we can begin converting the materials from TK’s library of assets over to Redshift (the new rendering engine we plan to use for maps). Some good news is that I just learned a programmer who worked on Wonder Woman with Ubercharge will be helping us automate the material conversion process. Got a few specific topics I can go into detail on, so here we go!

V0.06 Map Progress

Ubercharge has completed the gate for the map he began last week, and we’ve redesigned the map for it to use the “overhead” view instead of the perspective side view we were thinking about last week so that it can better highlight the awesome details he’s put in. Since the gate is a neat focal point we will be moving an event we didn’t have a location for to this map and will create a battle background using it, so the idea we had with the perspective view will survive through that.

I’ve created a basic block-out design for the next map, which is meant to be overlooking the Void before you descend into its streets.  It should vastly improve by the next update.

Nvidia Iray Rendering Engine

At some point last week Ubercharge gave TK and I a two hour presentation via Skype on physically based rendering to sell the idea of using Redshift for maps. Afterward I felt more confident with trying out Daz’s included physically based render, Nvidia Iray. I had originally tested it out with the intent of figuring out some good liquid materials, but got to thinking how much it’s been bothering me that our map graphic style and character art style have been diverging since we began doing maps with 3D. I went ahead and ran some tests on the characters with Iray and discovered I could quite easily get something very near to our character art style that doesn’t require any post processing. In that example, the image on the left was done using our old render and required compositing and post processing, whereas the image on the right (a relatively quick practice render) was done using Iray. At that point, I showed what I had to Uber and he was excited enough to download and learn the basics of Daz and Iray over the next day or so. Here’s a set of images he captured while testing out its capabilities. It was a smooth transition from his knowledge of Redshift, and after TK and I spent a couple of days figuring out Iray’s built in render manager it’s looking like we may switch over to Iray for character and story event artwork during the art overhaul. Once that rolls around, Uber is going to help me refine the artwork style further by focusing on more interesting/dramatic lighting and depending less on hard outlines and more on rim lighting and Fresnel reflections.  

Iray offers us a lot of benefits that the previous rendering engine, 3Delight, didn’t have. Some of these include:

• GPU based rendering
• Near real-time preview rendering right in the Daz viewport
• Global tone mapping options, meaning I can set brightness/saturation/etc. within the renderer instead of having to do it in Photoshop in post.
• HDR rendering via the EXR file format
• A built-in, scriptable render manager that can work in tandem with the render manager I coded at the end of last year.
• When rendering separate passes, all passes render simultaneously through some kind of black magic.
• Normal map output via the render manager, which could be invaluable if we attempt a shader-based 2D sprite lighting engine down the road.
• Physically based, meaning our character and story art can take advantage of Ubercharge’s PBR material expertise and match the look and high quality of the new rendering engine we intend to use for maps.
• Related to the above, Iray’s shaders will work properly in all lighting colors/conditions. Nonstandard lighting was something that had to be done in post with the other shaders.

If you’re wondering how those liquid material tests turned out, I’m pretty pleased with the results!

AltairPL’s URGE Engine Progress

When I got back to the Window class implementation, I had some brutal crashes and I've found out that I could really use some more feedback, so contrary to what I wrote in the last update I went and fixed the problem with debug messages not being properly outputted in most cases. This fix was well worth the time, but had one additional and not really intended side-effect. RPG Maker suppresses all Ruby warnings, which makes the programmer, such as me, a bit lazy/oblivious when it comes to some coding conventions. So, when I fixed the problem with debug messages I was literally flooded with various Ruby warnings. I'm happy to say that none of those warnings was a sign of something botched, but it was way too much information every game start/restart. Since I was already derailed, I dove into the Ruby scripts and fixed all warning spawning code that I was aware of... there's probably a few more of them hiding in the shadows, but I'm already lighter by roughly 800 warnings every game start/restart. Some fixes were as easy as typing a few characters, but some required a bit more work. On top of removing causes for warnings I also cleaned up a few related things, organized a few things a bit better, removed one or two obsolete pieces of code, etc.

With better debug information, I was able to finally make some progress with the Window class implementation. I've also fixed one major problem related to rendering and started suspecting one piece of code of being a potential source of memory leak... I tried testing it out, but was unable to verify it, so I've left my future self a note about keeping an eye on it and moved on.

Well, the Window class implementation is still far from over, so I wasn't able to realize my plans for the week, but all in all I'm really happy with what I've achieved.