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Halo 5 Forge |OT| Plan, Build, Share

T

Twilight Gap

Member
Dunno who saw when i posted this a month or so ago. Idea was a ship crashed in a mountain and you either fight in the ship or in the mountain around it.
[
CBzlAbL.jpg
Click to expand...

Well I started roughing out the Covenant ship and...

G7uD03h.png


343, still waiting on those goram Covenant Crates...
 
R

Raide

Member
Akai__ said:
How do I make the lighting not this pixelated?





Woah, that is a pretty neat idea. Good job so far!
Click to expand...

Tweaking the brightness and the drop off. How metallic the walls etc are will also dictate it a bit.

Trup1aya said:
Gorgeous! Looks I love the aesthetics. It looks like the first signs of spring and things are thawing
Click to expand...

I was hoping it worked ok. My favourite looking map so far.
 
C

Computron

Member
Akai__ said:
Is there a tutorial on how to do lights properly? Especially in closed rooms? I can't get them to work, like I want them to.
Click to expand...


Lighting can often be a job title in and of itself at many studios. Its the most interesting thing in Forge for me in this release by far. It even beats scripting because IMO that is super gimped and ass-backwards compared to what it could/should be. Tom French said they were looking to overhaul it eventually though...

343 has implemented many of the basics of what one might consider a decent shipping lighting system now, but there is still quite a bit to learn if you want to use it effectively.

The first thing I did when I got into forge was spend the whole day trying to build various test lighting setups like Cornell boxes to test the limits of whats possible. Its kinda dumb, but the default settings on the light fixtures coupled with the seemingly broken lightmaps on some of the largest primitive pieces originally led me to believe the lights lacked baked shadows entirely because of how low resolution everything was. (There was so much light bleeding everywhere. It doesn't help that even the matchmaking maps are built in such a way that they seemingly lack shadowing indoors) I have concerns now about certain pieces being almost unusable with static shadows, I think there may be something weird going on with tiny or overlapping or non-unique lightmap UVs on these pieces, it wouldn't surprise me. Large, thin primitives generate lots of blotches even when they are out in the open sun, possible because the back side shares lightmap UVs or due to imprecision or light bleeding.

There are a lot of hidden quirks and gotchas I am still finding out. Some things are not so obvious and need to be reverse engineered like how they calculate indirect lighting on dynamic objects and how their engine handles light bleeding and dynamic shadowing.

I am still figuring out how to maximize resolution and how the soft cap on lightmaps affects quality, but I might write something up soon. All the maps I have seen out there currently do a poor job compared to what is possible, even the matchmaking ones, but I suspect that is partially due to performance constraints in BTB and beta tools used to create them.

Its exciting though, because you can finally emulate some resemblance of GI/bounce-lighting, but its all done manually by-hand and in order not to run into budget constraints, you really have to design your map with lighting angles in mind from the getgo.
 
C

Computron

Member
Akai__ said:
How do I make the lighting not this pixelated?

oV9a4Zi.png
Click to expand...

First off, use FAR FEWER lights, but with larger angles and falloffs. If you absolutely need to have so many light fixtures on your ceiling, then turn off the light emission on like 3 quarters of them. (so only 1 quarter of them are actually affecting the lightmap, the white glow of the bulb will persist even if its not emitting to the lightmap) You seem to be facing some issues with banding/clipping, probably due to having many lights next to each-other multiplying the resultant light intensity value beyond what is reasonable for the lightmap to handle.

Consider faking some bounce lighting by pointing a spot light at the ceiling from the floor (sometimes you can abuse the geometry and clip the spotlight half way through the floor to help ensure that the lighting doesn't over-influence the floor) with a smaller intensity and falloff but an almost maxed out angle, that way your ceiling isn't pitch black and you can make up for the omitted lighting on the walls.

Light bounces in the real world, and Halo 5's forge does not simulate this for you.

Also, certain forge pieces have inconsistency with their shadow resolution as I mentioned in the above post, consider trying other wall pieces. (Particularly ones that aren't very thin, as the thin ones seem to bleed light from outside.) Additionally, try to avoid shadow casting point lights (as opposed to spot lights), their shadows are lower res, harder to control and can be murder for performance, (in terms of dynamic shadow casting, depending on if they implemented it the brute-force naive way, one spot light is equivalent to 6 shadow casting point lights when casting dynamic shadows)

Also, metallic walls really highlight the flaws in the lighting. design your maps with this in mind and consider making them more diffuse in areas where this will be a problem.
 
A

AlStrong

Member
Computron said:
I am still figuring out how to maximize resolution and how the soft cap on lightmaps affects quality, but I might write something up soon. All the maps I have seen out there currently do a poor job compared to what is possible, even the matchmaking ones, but I suspect that is partially due to performance constraints in BTB and beta tools used to create them.

Its exciting though, because you can finally emulate some resemblance of GI/bounce-lighting, but its all done manually by-hand and in order not to run into budget constraints, you really have to design your map with lighting angles in mind from the getgo.
Click to expand...

Would be very interested to read up on your findings!
 
C

Computron

Member
If anyone read the above in the last 30 minutes, I edited the posts above quite a bit after the fact as I typically do when I type up long posts and have a lot to add.
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
Twilight Gap said:
Dunno who saw when i posted this a month or so ago. Idea was a ship crashed in a mountain and you either fight in the ship or in the mountain around it.

Well I started roughing out the Covenant ship and...

G7uD03h.png


343, still waiting on those goram Covenant Crates...
Click to expand...

Very cool idea. I had a similar idea I might end up exploring once I get better at Forging. You have done a nice job thus far of making the Covenant pieces seem integrated as a whole rather than just colored bits.
 
C

Computron

Member
The problem with realtime game lighting in general is that it is half art/science. Until we got fully physically based, path traced dynamic lighting, there are going to be implementations with tons of parameters and trade-offs that you will have to learn to exploit. Especially with something that is half-realtime and half rapidly-precomputed like with forge. Their implementation is still impressive non-the-less.

We need to come up with some new descriptor for this style of technique. I propose HalfAssed-time lighting. :p


I wish there was some cloud based precomputed option to bump up the quality by a notch. I mean, we are already required to be on a dedicated server to forge in the first place, maybe run a defered/scheduled GI solver.
Maybe on file-save?
 
C

Computron

Member
nillapuddin said:
yeah good tip comp, Ill give that a go tonight
Click to expand...

I made a swinging platform hanging 3 stories off of a crane. (using a welded sphere in a ball-socket)

It's real neat, especially when you fly a banshee into the cable and send everything on the platform careening off the side of my skyscraper map.
 
nillapuddin

nillapuddin

Member
Computron said:
I made a swinging platform hanging 3 stories off of a crane. (using a welded sphere in a ball-socket)

It's real neat, especially when you fly a banshee into the cable and send everything on the platform careening off the side of my skyscraper map.
Click to expand...

that sounds awesome, yeah welding is so much more than I originally thought.

I think I was just so deflated from the interactive promises of forge past I didnt believe it could be that versatile



if nobody has seen this yet, even if you have
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/CrYinG LeGeNDs/video/13367392
its a must watch
 
V

VisceralBowl

Member
Computron said:
I wish there was some cloud based precomputed option to bump up the quality by a notch. I mean, we are already required to be on a dedicated server to forge in the first place, maybe run a defered/scheduled GI solver.
Maybe on file-save?
Click to expand...
I think the issue with this is that the lightmaps themselves would get pretty big, making the map filesize jump.
 
C

Computron

Member
VisceralBowl said:
I think the issue with this is that the lightmaps themselves would get pretty big, making the map filesize jump.
Click to expand...

The thought crossed my mind, but i dunno. There is a lot of advancement in the field that would help with that.

It seems to me that they might have simply lacked time or resources (They have seemingly repurposed and updated/extended the Halo 4 lighting tech for halo 5. Its got a lot of the same limitations and artifacts, IIRC even down to using the same "generating lighting..." screen, which is low res enough to seem likes its the 360 version, just stretched from 4:3 oddly. Does anyone get that impression, or his it been too long since i've loaded Halo 4?) They did ship this feature late with the promise of overhauling parts of it and adding new, canvases, palletes, pieces and systems.

I mean, they release almost biweekly patches that are hundreds of megs in size. You could include lightmaps for all the matchmade maps and only stream the lightmaps for user made custom-games maps you don't have cached locally. You could probably cache a several MB jpeg of a lightmap in the pregame lobby and it could often look better than what they got here. Hell, loading your dashboard with all the ads and the in-game splash-screens might actually consume more bandwidth.

But, i dunno, im not privy to the details, so there could easily be some constraint that I am not seeing or underestimating.
I readily concede that, but I really wish they took a step further as good lighting is extremely effective at making maps that dont look like "forge maps."
 
A

Akai__

Member
Raide said:
Tweaking the brightness and the drop off. How metallic the walls etc are will also dictate it a bit.
Click to expand...

This had little to no effect, sadly.

Computron said:
-snip-
Click to expand...

Computron said:
-snip-
Click to expand...

I will try this next. Thanks for your long posts. Really appreciate it.

Kibbles said:
Welcome to next gen
Click to expand...

I understand that lighting is a quite complex thing, but I wouldn't have this problem if I could just turn off shadow casting in general and had a map where it's bright equally everywhere. The shadows are the worst offender for me in Forge. Just take Pegasus as an example and how hard it is to see Team Blue in the shadowed areas sometimes. 2nd issue that I have with Forge is the too bright sun on the current MM maps, like Recurved, Deadlock and some others. I don't get why you need that level of brightness/lens flare. It makes it really hard to see stuff and it's too distracting.
 
T

The Kree

Banned
You people are coming up with a lot of cool stuff already. That speaks to the toolset as much as the creators. Impressive.
 
C

Computron

Member
Akai__ said:
I understand that lighting is a quite complex thing, but I wouldn't have this problem if I could just turn off shadow casting in general and had a map where it's bright equally everywhere. The shadows are the worst offender for me in Forge. Just take Pegasus as an example and how hard it is to see Team Blue in the shadowed areas sometimes. 2nd issue that I have with Forge is the too bright sun on the current MM maps, like Recurved, Deadlock and some others. I don't get why you need that level of brightness/lens flare. It makes it really hard to see stuff and it's too distracting.
Click to expand...

You actually can turn off the light baking on a per object basis. (last option under "object properties" for most static pieces)

Turning it off globally, however, is very much not the solution you should be striving for.
 
A

Akai__

Member
Computron said:
You actually can turn off the light baking on a per object basis. (last option under "object properties" for most static pieces)

Turning it off globally, however, is very much not the solution you should be striving for.
Click to expand...

I tired it several times and objects didn't stop to cast shadows. I was really confused and frustrated.

Anyways, I managed to improve the lighting just now. Just need to remove some of the lights, like you suggested and I will be even more satisfied. I'll leave that for later in the day, though. Thanks again. <3

Twilight Gap said:
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/A 3 Legged Goat/video/13393107

gonna be interesting to see how this turns out.
Click to expand...

Did you change your GAF username again? Sneaky and no wonder your doodles looked familiar. That looks pretty cool.
 
C

Computron

Member
Akai__ said:
I tired it several times and objects didn't stop to cast shadows. I was really confused and frustrated.

Anyways, I managed to improve the lighting just now. Just need to remove some of the lights, like you suggested and I will be even more satisfied. I'll leave that for later in the day, though. Thanks again. <3
Click to expand...

Ah, difference of terms. I mean static shadows when I say shadows. There is no way to turn off dynamic shadows, but the lack of direct/indirect baked lighting will significantly brighten up your map. IMO it will still look shitty without baked lighting.


Adjusting the far fog setting actually changes the image-based indirect lighting everywhere on your map after you update lighting. Found this out yesterday, it can be used to brighten everything even with a low thickness to the fog. Its a clever little quirk by 343.
 
T

Twilight Gap

Member
Computron said:
Nice. Is that all built in one 42 minutes session as the clock suggests?

(it would be cool if that timer was a global time spent on map.)
Click to expand...

would definitely be cool to see total time spent on a map. i'd say i've put 2ish hours on the ship itself, most of it just dwaddling about to make sure it feels right.

and this is still a scratch canvas. once i'm satisfied with the aesthetics and rough paths i'll rebuild it and usually descale things. plus i want to experiment with tilting the ship.

cluckinho said:
When you're outside it legit looks like a real covie ship. Very impressive. I've always like your forging style, my favorite of your's being Jackal Creek.
Click to expand...

thanks. have to make sure the outside is smooth as well so part of the top can be used to tac jump onto the snow ledges.
 
W

WordsintheWater

Member
It seems like you guys are adding that inventiveness that is lacking from the maps that 343 has made. You are making these actually feel like real places in the universe and not just arenas. Keep up the good work.
 
B

belushy

Banned
Twilight Gap said:
Dunno who saw when i posted this a month or so ago. Idea was a ship crashed in a mountain and you either fight in the ship or in the mountain around it.

Well I started roughing out the Covenant ship and...

G7uD03h.png


343, still waiting on those goram Covenant Crates...
Click to expand...

Looks really good!
 
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