Anduo Report - February 12th, 2023

Heya all! Vils here with the weekly lewds for the week!

bär:

"Heya! I've been working on a million things I think. Rigging, model fixes, animation, performance optimization, storage size optimization (aka compressing everything), switching out the entire lighting setup, learning all about tons of hdrp (high definition render pipeline) workflows, writing dialogue, cutting voice acting sound files, implementing game logic"

"you name it, I did it lol"

The last thing I did just today was tons and tons of lighting changes. Essentially our current working setup boils down to increasing the sun brightness way past what it had been in the past. This lets us have really pretty dark corners and super bright well lit areas, aka contrast!"

"This lets us do plays with light and shadow like overwhelming the foreground with brightness in the distance like this"

"Idk if we want to keep it the way it is right now where it overwhelms the dark area so much that it's essentially black, but it's cool to have the option to do this sort of stuff. With the previous lighting setup, contrast like this wasn't really possible."

"With this new setup, I finally feel like we have easy to use artistic control over the look of the scene! It's not perfect yet, especially the boring blue sky is something I wanna change, but I'm sooo excited to finally have a clean, easy to use base to build on top of!"

"A huge part of the new lighting system is the new hdrp "Probe Volume". Essentially its hundreds of invisible spheres that get baked raytraced lighting."

"Each sphere stores information about how bounced light looks at that point in space. It does not store information about light hitting it directly, since that can be done very cheaply in realtime. The important part is the bounce light, aka raytraced light."

"Usually dynamic objects only know a lit and an unlit brightness. Either hit by the sun or in shadow. Nothing in between."

"But with this system of lighting balls, we can have this really nice raytraced lighting approximation that lets our characters have nicely simulated light!"

"Essentially, for each pixel that is rendered on a character, the pixel gets the closest lighting ball and takes it's raytraced brightness."

"The next obstacle after solving this turned out to be reflections. By default, everything simply reflects the sky. This is fine in an area that has nothing obstructing the sky, but because we're in this castle with insanely massive walls, the vast majority of the horizon is not covered by sky, but walls instead. On top of that, many of the walls are not lit because they are in shadow."

"This leads to very weird looking reflections on all sorts of surfaces. The solution is to create Reflection Probes. These probes need to be placed manually in many places of the level. They essentially create a 360 panorama screenshot, which is then used to generate reflections. Here's some before/after shots!"

"Besides these changes, there are tons of small changes like exposure, eye adaptation, fog brightness, sun color, cloud setup and much more."

"I'll finish up with some pretty new characters that are in engine now! (tho these recordings were taken with the old lighting)"

pmperfect:

"Hey there!!"

"A lot of stuff has been done, both minor and major ones"

"As you can see by Bear magic with lighting and baking, overall look drastically improved, here are some of town elements I've been working meanwhile: For starters, after a couple more iterations we arrived to the inner and outer walls we are happy with, it is a combination of geometrical ornaments with baked ones, one minor issue arose with inner walls that now it is too heavy, so some optimisation is in order, but overall I'm quite happy with 'em both."

"Later we've encountered and issue with layout of the market, it was too easy to just breeze through it, missing all the cool stuff that can be found there, so we decided to play with it and as solution - breaking a part market on smaller more intimate areas worked nicely and I like new "cozy" closed vibe."

"After that some improvement of the couches was in order, Bear found some intriguing ornaments that looked extremely cool, so here are first two couches with new complex ornaments, what do you think?"

"Oh and as a bonus, we found out how much stylized foliage change too realistic (for our purposes) tree vibe to something that totally fits our needs."

"That's all from me for this report!   Thank you for you attention and cya all next week! :)"

========= SPOILERS BELOW =========

Vils:

"We've been putting together the next portion of the main story. Much like how the last mission we left on focused on Rida and her tribe, this one will be focusing on Floria and her 'tribe' of Florian offspring. This means a return to Sublevel 2 and an introduction to the fabled Sublevel 3 and beyond."

"Because the story if steering in Floria's direction, expect a bunch of CGs featuring everyone's favorite plant lady!"

"Such as this one that's still work-in-progress featuring Floria and another character! Care to guess who the other character is? It'll be a difficult guess. ;)"

"Speaking of work-in-progress, here's the loss CG that didn't quite make it into the last update!"

"And here's a variant of a new pinup that'll be making it into the game for this update!"

"Other than dialogue and content creation, I've caught up with some more tech debt and fixed some bugs with our translation system causing soft locks."

That's all for this week! We'll see you all next time for another Anduo Report!