I’m interested in why he’s doing this with Skyrim, while it has been updated it still uses the old content authored around late 360/PS3 long before physically based materials came along which have more information for the renderer to know what to do with light energy. It’s great what is accomplished in spite of that, but later games like Fallout4 does have PBR materials. Then you get some mods on top of these which try to add the information with a heavy hand to show off the new features, like when it’s raining turn every wet surface into a mirror to demonstrate reflections
I think that a broader problem is that a lot of both games are not constrained to be physically accurate. Like, there are things lit up because it looks nice even though there’s no in-game light source (like blue glowy caves or well-lit building interiors in Skyrim), or things lit up that don’t cast light for performance reasons (like a bunch of neon signs in Fallout 4).
The devs tweaked it to look nice and dramatic, which wasn’t always in line with what things would look like given an accurate rendering using the light sources that exist in-game.
Both games are notorious for having very bright nights outside. That bothers some people due to lack of realism, but making nights accurately dark, which a number of mods did, results in players stumbling around at night having a hard tine seeing anything, which annoys others.
Maybe one could just re-light the world and the mods that add areas – there are mods that do basically relight the world already – but I think that it’d be easier to start with a game that tries to use more-or-less accurate lighting from the get-go and then makes gameplay that works with that lighting.
Yeah, I think artistic “rule of cool” is going to be interesting in the coming years as RT becomes more common. That said, just as rasterization lighting has a lot of fakery to make it look good, I wouldn’t be surprised if some level designers/lighting artists bend the rules a bit to make lighting behave how they want instead of slavishly following how reality would work (the idea that comes to mind is off-scene light sources where rays can enter the scene by passing one-way through some geometry). As usual the skill is in performing the trick without anyone noticing.
That’s the thing with it being software rather than reality, you can tell it to do what you want, which should also include non-photoreal styles. As far as I can tell ultimately it’s all maths and rules.
Ah yes I see you’ve met every Minecraft shader
This looks like a bad reshade to me…
Does it overcome the limit of four shadow-casting lights rendered at any given time? Because IMO this is the biggest limitation of old Creation engine’s lighting system.
Otherwise, judging by the visuals in teaser video, a carefully crafted lighting mod in conjunction with a carefully crafted ENB preset can come close to what I saw in the teaser—or at least look very, very good for an old game like this.
