Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Black Dragon 64x - Update 2.9.9 "Spring Dragon"

Whew.



Another update. Lots of updates. We can't get enough of them.


Finally adds the windlight transition options into the windlight environment settings window.

Changes a few quality options around and caps the object quality (VolumeLOD) to 4 max, sorry but it had to be done.

The missing shadow distance options have been added to the machinima sidebar and i made another pass over some options, SSAO Effect for instance can now be set lower and higher than before, same with Glow Iterations and Width.

I hope to have the friendlist sorting fixed now, tell me if its not.

In this release the old original Screen Space Reflections from Tofu make its comeback, i tossed away all my changes and tweaks to it and only applied the latest ones, see how you like it. It's slower but should look nicer overall (hopefully).

Old Black Dragon SSR
Todu's original SSR

Tofu's original SSR + my latest tweaks

Shadow distance has been tweaked to have roughly the same precision as it had before with 200-400m, this means shadows are more pixelated closeup but are overall sharper on normal every day usage distance.

A few here and there tweaks on the UI to fix a few stuff, mostly tiny offsets and annoying scaling issues that you probably don't care about at all. Viewer UI care... stuff i really care about.






2 comments:

  1. hey! just some thoughts on SSR.

    once i started to dig into how SL speculars work, i found that 'glossiness' parameter is basically a roughness value (1 = rough / scattered, 255 = smooth / glossy), while 'environment' is reflectivity level. combining both parameters, surface may have a scattered light reflection, glossy light reflection, blurry image reflection or crisp image reflection or anything in between.

    but how SSR works right now, looks kinda wrong to my eyes - visually it looks like a reflection, but it neither obeys 'environment' parameter, nor 'glossiness' parameter, just specular color. so, it's always gives this 'reflective' look to the surface, no matter what roughness or reflectivity is.

    but, anyway, it's just my thoughts.

    Beev.

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    Replies
    1. I chose the always clear reflection over the slightly more realistic (calculation wise) approach because the randomized scattering doesn't just look annoying and basically wastes the entire calculation for nothing, it also tanks performance additionally to the already heavy SSR calculations.

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