Has PBR for Doom been a disappointment so far?

Taking the original images and adding PBR layers is a great idea. The same could be done for sprites - this would simulate models as good as PBR textures simulate depth in walls/flats. In all honesty, this is much more approachable than trying to create hi-res replacements and adding PBR layers.

On 9/20/2018 at 10:22 PM, Bauul said:

 

I think a community project is a pretty good idea actually.  

 

There are 617 textures/flats in the Doom2 iwad.  If we got just a dozen people contributing, that's just 50 odd textures each.  Creating a height map and a specular map is not that time intensive for graphics as low-res as Doom's.  Even just a height map would be a start, then at least we would have Parallax Mapping working (which I personally think holds more promise, as it doesn't require dynamic lights).

Alright! I've made a discord, it's not finished yet, but it'll show me how many are interested in helping, and how many are just interested

https://discord.gg/9myqBV4

EDIT : Discord deleted. Too few people were interested.

Hey, how about making PBR textures for Heretic instead? It only has 66 flats and 99 real textures.

I for one would also love to see PBR Materials for the original, lowres id textures. While PBR certainly looks great on highres textures as well, it's always those highres textures which distract me too much from the "Doom feeling". Especially when the original low-res sprites are still in play.

Adding those fancy modern effects to retro pixelart has kind of its own charm. Similar to some modern games like Octopath Traveller.

20 minutes ago, elend said:

I for one would also love to see PBR Materials for the original, lowres id textures. While PBR certainly looks great on highres textures as well, it's always those highres textures which distract me too much from the "Doom feeling". Especially when the original low-res sprites are still in play.

Adding those fancy modern effects to retro pixelart has kind of its own charm. Similar to some modern games like Octopath Traveller.

That's EXACTLY what the community project is going to be all about!

On 9/18/2018 at 10:05 PM, hardcore_gamer said:

I have also noticed that there is virtually nobody (or if there are, feel free to show me them) working on any mods that are taking advantage of the new PBR textures.

Ehm 

and 

On 9/1/2018 at 10:54 AM, Honey16 said:

12 hours ago, elend said:

I for one would also love to see PBR Materials for the original, lowres id textures. While PBR certainly looks great on highres textures as well, it's always those highres textures which distract me too much from the "Doom feeling". Especially when the original low-res sprites are still in play.

To me the reason for that is because the Doom artwork was made for CRT gammas and looks washed-out next to modern stuff. It could be the real reason why people enjoy the low res PBR textures more?

I never once got the sense that the Doom artwork was washed-out. AFAIK monitors still generally use the same gamma that they always have*, 2.2. The biggest exception I can think of was Mac pre-OSX 10.6, where it's 1.8; even they switched to 2.2 of late, though.

If anything, I always thought modern stuff, with their frequent desaturation and tint filters (though we're getting better about it), looked more washed-out than Doom does, with its bold, saturated reds, blues and greens spattered about.

(*Or, at least, were supposed to; obviously there was some variance if people genuinely found themselves having to use the gamma settings in various games.)

I'm not talking about saturation, more like contrast. You can see it especially in the reds. The chaingunners now stand out like a sore thumb whereas they used to hide better in the shadows.

Hi-res definitely has its place. But, the beauty of working on low-res PBR stuff is:

• It's approachable.
• Does not require quite as much artistic ability - you don't have to draw the textures, just the pixel properties of the pre-existing textures. Still a ton of work - I just mean that you don't have to also design the texture from scratch.
• The best benefit: PBR will make the original textures look hi-res, to some degree. And, depending on how the renderer works, they may actually become hi-res, as the PBR processing affects each destination pixel vs. source pixel.

On 9/20/2018 at 6:51 PM, kb1 said:

Taking the original images and adding PBR layers is a great idea. The same could be done for sprites - this would simulate models as good as PBR textures simulate depth in walls/flats. In all honesty, this is much more approachable than trying to create hi-res replacements and adding PBR layers.

Can sprites be PBR?  I guess you'd have to draw a depth-map by hand for every frame?  It would be interesting to see if this would be possible and how it would look.

Skimmed through the replies, but has anyone mentioned the fact that a lot of the doom textures have "built in" shadows. That is obviously going to to look awful with real shadows from you know...3d objects. Look at that simple brown96 texture, it's suppose to have those little protruding parts clearly in 3d, but it's a flat texture because of the limits. All the textures that don't have those shadows(basically flat surfaces) look pretty decent.

7 minutes ago, pulkmees said:

Skimmed through the replies, but has anyone mentioned the fact that a lot of the doom textures have "built in" shadows. That is obviously going to to look awful with real shadows from you know...3d objects. Look at that simple brown96 texture, it's suppose to have those little protruding parts clearly in 3d, but it's a flat texture because of the limits. All the textures that don't have those shadows(basically flat surfaces) look pretty decent.

Yeah you're absolutely right. In proper PBR, one of the maps (my mind is blanking on what it's called) contains purely the color of each pixel. No lighting information or shading information, as that's all held in the other maps. The Doom textures has that baked into them, so ideally we'd need to go through and "unbake" the shadows and sheens from every texture.

However, then the textures would look especially awful in Doom's default sector lighting.  You'd have to always use dynamic lights, and GZDoom's lighting system mostly isn't really good enough for that yet. It works best when used in parallel to dyn-lights. So while technically you're correct, for now it's probably fine to leave the shadows in.

37 minutes ago, grahf said:

Can sprites be PBR?  I guess you'd have to draw a depth-map by hand for every frame?  It would be interesting to see if this would be possible and how it would look.

I remember asking a similar question in the past and I think it isn't possible. And it would be a massive pain anyway, seeing as you would need like 4-5 texture maps per frame of animation. It just isn't that feasible.

9 minutes ago, hardcore_gamer said:

I remember asking a similar question in the past and I think it isn't possible.

Yeah you're right, it isn't at the moment. The current lighting engine doesn't work with sprites that way. Imagine you're facing a monster, and just behind the monster is a dyn-light. In reality, the monster would be silhouetted, but in GZDoom it's rendered full bright.  Sprite brightness is based merely on the proximity to a dyn-light, not the direction. 

For PBR on sprites to work, the whole lighting engine would have to be upgraded first.

22 minutes ago, Bauul said:

For PBR on sprites to work, the whole lighting engine would have to be upgraded first.

Doesn't sound like it would be worth the effort seeing as few people would use PBR for sprites anyway.

On 9/22/2018 at 9:09 PM, hardcore_gamer said:

 

Doesn't sound like it would be worth the effort seeing as few people would use PBR for sprites anyway.

I'm not sure, this sounds like a useful update, but more for custom new content than vanilla doom sprite updates IMO.

4 hours ago, Cage said:

I'm not sure, this sounds like a useful update, but more for custom new content than vanilla doom sprite updates IMO.

I'm not sure if PBR sprites would even look good. Realistic sprites sounds like oxymoron to me. Sprites work for cartoonish graphics but when they look photorealistic they just look like cardboard cutouts which isn't very convincing. This is actually one of the problems I had with DSC since it had some high res sprite statues which looked rather silly to me. And they weren't even PBR.

All comes down to the style you're aiming to achieve anyways, doesn't have to be Realistic, Fortnite and Zelda Breath of the Wild use PBR but their style isn't aiming to make the game look Realistic, I've never heard of sprite PBR and i'm not sure it's even possible or worth the effort, just make a damn 3D model lol.

EDIT: Actually bump maps and normal maps can also be useful for particle sprites to make them appear more, well, bumpy, I used them once to make this particle system's material when I was experimenting with UE4's Cascade, It's for a liquid effect, makes it appear shiny and slightly bumpy.

2D games use things like normal maps on sprites to let the lighting interact with them.  Check out tools like Sprite DLight or Sprite Illuminator to see some examples of the effect.

Trying to imagine what it would look like for Doom, I have a feeling that it would either look really weird or most likely just not be very noticeable.  

12 minutes ago, david_a said:

2D games use things like normal maps on sprites to let the lighting interact with them.  Check out tools like Sprite DLight or Sprite Illuminator to see some examples of the effect.

 

Trying to imagine what it would look like for Doom, I have a feeling that it would either look really weird or most likely just not be very noticeable.  

Side scrollers are different though since you can only see the sprites from one specific angle.

One difficulty with sprites is the way they always face the camera.  Imagine you're standing next to a Spiderdemon corpse, and rotate the camera. We all remember how the leg of the corpse rapidly spins around as you rotate due to the sprite always facing the camera. But that rotation isn't physically present in the game, AFAIK there are no coordinates changing, it's just a rendering effect. So how would the game know how to apply directional lightning?  It's not an issue for small sprites, but for big sprites it'd look very weird.

On 9/22/2018 at 2:46 PM, Bauul said:

 

Yeah you're right, it isn't at the moment. The current lighting engine doesn't work with sprites that way. Imagine you're facing a monster, and just behind the monster is a dyn-light. In reality, the monster would be silhouetted, but in GZDoom it's rendered full bright.  Sprite brightness is based merely on the proximity to a dyn-light, not the direction. 

 

For PBR on sprites to work, the whole lighting engine would have to be upgraded first.

That's too bad. Come to think about about, I suppose I understand why: in hardware rendering, sprites are considered to be basically cardboard cutouts. Though, come to think of it, so are textures... I don't see why sprites would be that much more trouble, but I could be wrong.

But, yes, it'd be worth it, even for the original sprites. It would look amazing to see a fireball fly by a monster, lighting up one side of their face, then the other, with some shadowing. This would make the sprites come alive, as if they actually had some depth. They could look like models. And no one could say that they didn't look like the originals :) Win-win.

If you want to see sprites with normals, speculars, etc. lit by dynlights you could just look at amid evil's first person weapon sprites.

18 hours ago, MarisaKirisame said:

If you want to see sprites with normals, speculars, etc. lit by dynlights you could just look at amid evil's first person weapon sprites.

I have seen videos of Amid Evil and had no idea the weapons are sprites.  That's really impressive!  I think the effect would look really cool in Doom but of course for Amid Evil they almost certainly 3d rendered their weapons and it was easy to export normal, specular for each frame.  Whereas for Doom, creating normal/specular for the existing weapons would be a much bigger undertaking

On 9/18/2018 at 9:29 PM, kb1 said:

Has anyone noticed the lack of 3D models for the Doom monsters?

Honestly, it surprises me a bit. I can't draw or model for shit personally, but Doom has a huge community and 25 years of contributions. I'd love to see 3D models that are faithful to the original designs of the Doom 1/2 monsters.

19 hours ago, MarisaKirisame said:

amid evil's first person weapon sprites.

Cool, so these are sprites? I haven't tried the game myself so I couldn't tell from the videos.

2 hours ago, grahf said:

I have seen videos of Amid Evil and had no idea the weapons are sprites. 

That just sort of begs the question of what the point was honestly. Why not just use models seeing as they are using a modern engine and everything else is 3D anyway?

2 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

That just sort of begs the question of what the point was honestly.

Because the game is build on being extremly optimized. I quote their storepage: "OPTIMIZED to run on a toaster (a pretty nice toaster)" 

A sprite with a normal map as viewmodel looks almost identical to a high polygone 3d model but is much faster to render. I'd love seeing this in gzdoom too